Abstract

Lived experiences of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) have been relegated to the margins of the humanities and social sciences research, even in the field of critical disability studies. The limits of existing research methods, which privilege written and spoken forms of communication, and the ableism entrenched in academic infrastructures, I argue, have been instrumental to this marginalization. In an attempt to disrupt these hierarchies, this thesis proposes a new research method called “craft-based interviews” as a way to do research, not on or about, but with intellectually disabled people through the process of creating together and communicating by other means than only words. “Craft-based interviews”, in the way I theorize it, is a process-based method that can open up new channels of communicating in ways that counter and resist intellectual ableism in research practices and its privileging of the linguistic. Mobilizing the experimental ethos of research-creation, “craft-based interviews” affords a critical intervention, not only in enabling the participation of people with IDD in research, but in reckoning with ontological questions of knowledge, research and power. Through a detailed thematic analysis of the craft-based interviews I conducted with two people with IDD, and a discourse analysis of the correspondences I had with my own institution’s ethics board, I explore the new possibilities that “craft-based interviews” can open up, and also interrogate the institutional barriers to conducting research with people with IDD in the humanities and social sciences.