Over the last two decades, inclusion and participation have become leading policy concepts within the Dutch chronic care and social welfare sector. People with an intellectual or psychiatric disability ought to get a chance to participate in, and belong to, the mainstream of our society-on the basis of equality and equivalence. Although on an international level this pursuit has been going on for at least five decades, it still raises all kinds of questions and debates. What does it mean if we want people with intellectual and/or psychiatric disabilities to participate in our society? Based on which idea(l)s about humanity do we define equality and equivalence? And by doing so, how much space is left for individual differences? In the following dialogue the two authors navigate the tension between similarity and difference in thinking about-and working towards-more space for marginalized people. In an attempt to withstand the contemporary dominance of equality thinking, marked by a strong focus on tenability and autonomy-and by extension an increasing climate of taboo around vulnerability and dependency-both authors stress the importance of recognizing and valuing difference, while discussing encounters between people with and without a severe intellectual and/or multiple disability.
Social inclusion policies often assume that community integration is beneficial for all people with disabilities. Little is known about what actually happens in encounters between people with and without severe intellectual disabilities in the public space. Based on social-constructionist and responsive-phenomenological insights, we performed participant observation, semi-structured interviews and researcher reflexivity to study encounters between Harry (pseudonym), a man with a severe intellectual disability, his neighbours, fellow service-users, support professionals, and the first author. A thinking-with-theory strategy was adopted to interpret and deepen observations and reflections. We argue for more 'experimental-relational spaces of encounter' between people with and without severe intellectual disabilities, wherein the latter put down their verbal and cognitive weaponry. This proved to be more appropriate for spending 'quality time' with Harry then typical satisfactory neighbourhood interactions -often embedded in verbality, habits, routines and rationalizations that do not reflect the existence of people with severe intellectual disabilities.
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Background: Maintaining collaborative research relations is challenging, as shown by a range of personal accounts of researchers with experiential expertise, emerging from reflected lived experiences within medical or social care institutions.Objective: In contrast, there is a shortage of narratives of researchers without experiential expertise, rendering their specific perspectives largely unaccounted for -a gap that is addressed in this paper. Methods:The interpretative method of "interactive interviewing" is used to systematically reflect on how two researchers without experiential expertise perceived personal and emotional unsettlement in collaborative projects in the fields of Mental Health (MH) and Intellectual and Developmental Disability (IDD).Results: Four cases are presented to illustrate and advocate the value of unsettling encounters in collaborative research. Underlying is the ethical and methodological position that collaborative research is primarily characterized by its potential to unsettle the relations between the people and parties involved. This position derives from the critical autobiography of the disability studies scholar Kathryn Church, and contrasts to the widely held assumption that collaborative research is largely characterized by a set of distinct methods or techniques.Discussion: Some of the epistemic and methodological gains and challenges of approaching collaborative research as a means to facilitate and reflect on unsettling encounters are presented and discussed in relation to overarching theoretical and normative-ethical arguments.Community Contribution: This paper purposefully lacks any form of involvement, explicitly focussing on the perspectives and experiences of researchers without experiential expertise in the context of collaborative research relationships.
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