This article takes up Goodley’s challenge to explore the ways in which poststructuralist research methodologies open up new ways of thinking about encounters with disability. Working with the materiality of their own encounters with disability and the conceptual possibilities opened up in poststructuralist and new materialist thought, the six authors deconstruct the ability/disability binary through animating disability differently. They draw on memories generated in a collective biography workshop to explore the ways in which concepts, such as heterotopia, can be put to work to mobilize a humanity-in-common that is both multiple and open to differenciation, that is, to continuously becoming different.
Every family culture is ruled by unspoken codes. Throughout the short film Lode's Code, Marieke Vandecasteele (the first author) searches for these codes within her own family in a visualethnographic way. In traditional research, families with a family member with a disability are often pinned down to individual categories linked with linear explanations. Vandecasteele's search for the code of her brother Lode and for her own position in the parental nest-with leaving home as a red thread-resulted in a hybrid animated documentary where subjective experiences prevail over the search for explanations. It shows how layered codes intraact in the family machine and can (be) move(d). This paper focuses on the rhizomatic process of making the film. How were the keys to Vandecasteele's family code shaped and what was the role of animation film as a medium? An in-depth discussion shows how poetic research of this kind offers opportunities within the interdisciplinary research domain of Disability Studies to let the complexity inherent to a family with a member with a disability emerge in all its richness and multilayeredness.
Creativity and affect in families with a family member, who is labelled as disabled, is central in this article. These families are often pinned down to individual, closed categories where everything revolves around the label “disability.” Our research goes beyond binary thinking in terms of abled/disabled and other linear explanations by using artistic processes as ethnography. We start from encounters between two people who both created something about their “non-ordinary” brothers. One (first author) made a shortfilm/documentary about her own family, the other (research participant) wrote a TV series about a man who takes care of his brother after their mother’s death, which was not autobiographical yet inspired by his own experiences. The first author distilled etchings from their encounters, which piece together different layers: the scenarist’s biographical story, the story of creating the series, the series’ script and the first author’s thoughts and readings. The concept of re-touche—of touching and being touched, and in this way returning to family fissures and creating something new from them—runs through this art-based project.
Two women have become mothers. They both make art. They both grew up in a family with a sibling labelled as disabled. Ted, a visual artist, has made photographic and video work about her youngest sister. Marieke, an ethnographic filmmaker, created a short film about her eldest brother which fuelled her PhD about non-normative family lives. Intrigued by motherhood and sisterhood they start writing letters, through which they bring their memories, thoughts, artistic creations into life. This arts-based study is about entangled motherhood—i.e., the entanglement of mother-sister-daughter roles and the intergenerational entanglement of the present, past, and future—in the context of encounters with difference and care. By writing letters as a way of acting on the world and situating themselves within things, they intend to open up new forms of knowledge production, moving away from medicalized and binary ways of studying (growing up in) families with a labelled family member.
What is it like to grow up in a family with different norms? 'Lode's Code' is an auto- visual ethnographic portrait that shows the relationship with the filmmaker oldest brother Lode and her search into her own position within the family nest. Her leaving is the common thread. Using family footage collected over four years; Marieke (the filmmaker) has made a hybrid animation-documentary. She does not offer explanations, but brings subjective experiences to the fore.
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