Troubling ambulant research: Disabled people's socio-spatial encounters with urban un/safety and the politics of mobile methods

Abstract

This paper offers a critical reflection on the use of walking and mobile interviews in the context of research with disabled people whose diverse corporealities and cognitions challenge assumptions about walking as a normative bodily act associated with free, autonomous, mobility. While it has been suggested that mobile methods hold out the potential to open up dialogic and participative spaces of inquiry that capture embodied, affectual, and sensory knowledges in place, there has been less discussion of how social and bodily difference shapes the politics and practices of methods on the move. Drawing on research exploring disabled people's socio-spatial knowledges and experiences of urban un/safety in Ireland, we address this lacuna by reflecting on our use of ‘go-along’ interviews with people with diverse impairments and mobilities. Recognising the barriers that mediate disabled people's use of urban space, we interrogate both what go-along interviews can contribute to our understanding of disabled people's embodied encounters with urban un/safety, but also the limits, challenges and politics of mobile interviews as a form of methodological practice. We suggest there is a need to advance interdisciplinary social science scholarship which troubles ambulant research, and writes social and bodily difference into mobility studies and mobile methods.