Returning the Gaze: Ethical-Methodological Approaches in a Study
with Persons with Intellectual Disabilities
Ann Fudge Schormans and Adrienne [email protected]
February 15th, 2011
What does it mean to reconsider ethics when engaged in research with vulnerable populations, such as people with intellectual disabilities?
How is the question of vulnerability informed by philosophical considerations about the nature of human subjects and our responsibility to vulnerability and human relationships?
The practices and objects of representation engage the fundamental question of the humanity and/or dehumanization of lives.
Each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies—as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of a publicity at once assertive and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure. (Judith Butler, 2004:20)
When we consider the ordinary ways that we think about humanization and dehumanization, we find the assumption that those who gain representation, especially self-representation, have a better chance of being humanized, and those who have no chance to represent themselves run a great risk of being treated as less than human, regarded as less than human, or indeed, not regarded at all.
(Judith Butler, 2004:141)
Interrogative Encounters with Public Photographic Images of People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities
Troubling Photographic Re-presentations
Trembling the (non)Disabled Gaze: Invite, Disrupt, and Engage with the Viewer’s Gaze
Engagement:
Presumption of Competence
The encounter with the Other is my responsibility for him. (Levinas, 1998)
A Particular Form of Attentiveness
Rethinking the Term / Terms of the Interview
Cycles of Conversations Among Group Members and Between Researcher and Group Members
What do we do with the layers of reflexivity and potential wounding that occur as part and parcel of addressing and redressing forms of othering?
When ‘wounding’ moves beyond being only an individual concern.
Can – and should – wounding be avoided?
Contact Information
Ann Fudge Schormans, Ph.D., R.S.W.McMaster University
Adrienne Chambon, Ph.D.University of Toronto
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