Knowing Through Tripping: A Performative Praxis for Co-Constructing Knowledge as a Disabled Halfie

Introduction

After attending a disability and development meeting in a village in South India, a group of disabled participants and I walked out to catch the bus. As we started walking, I bumped into a big rock that was jutting out from the corner of the unpaved street. Unable to see it on a dimly lit street through my limited peripheral vision, I tripped and fell flat on the road. My tripping generated tremendous disconcert among fellow disabled participants, spurring them into immediate action to lift me off the ground. One of them sighed and remarked, “oh . . . we forget you have a disability . . . that you cannot see that well.” This reaction came as a surprise to me, as I was under the impression that my disability identity and positionality were quite legible to the disabled community. This small drama marked a turning point in my understanding and management of the embodied, cultural, political, and ethical contingencies involved in framing disability research in transnational contexts.

I had embarked upon my fieldwork thinking that as a woman with disability from India, doing disability research in India would give me the advantage of being an “insider” to the experiential world of disability in India. While these broad subject-positions did offer a vantage point, it was that of an in-betweener, or what Abu-Lughod (1991) terms “halfie.” Abu-Lughod challenges the rigid boundaries between “native-foreign, us-them, and insider-outsider” drawn by traditional anthropologists in studying culture. She argues that the process of knowing is always mediated by the subject-position of the researcher, and that the presence or absence of the researcher in the process of knowing can never be complete or absolute. Sharing multiple partial identities with research subjects may facilitate a partial epistemological blending of horizons, such that the researcher may gain a better understanding of their informants’ life worlds. As a halfie, I was a person with disability—an Indian woman with disability, a researcher with disability—yet also a lighter skinned, an urban North Indian from the capital city of Delhi, working in the United States amid relative socioeconomic privilege, doing disability research in the context of rural South India. I was located at the intersections of all these positionalities, just as my research participants and interlocutors occupied multiple positionalities.

My ethnographic research centered on the experiences of disabled people participating in microfinance and Self Help Group (SHG) projects of the World Bank in rural districts of Telangana, formerly part of Andhra Pradesh (a state in South India). ¹ Illuminating the changing relationships between the state and its disabled citizenry, my research revealed responsibilization (Foucault, 1980), dispossession, and structural violence to understand the kinds of disabled subjects produced through neoliberal microfinance and community-based rehabilitation projects. This research showed how the neoliberal orientation of the Indian state translated into approaches to disability that focused on “correcting” the body through medical interventions and approaches to poverty that ignored structural inequality in privileging microfinance as a poverty “solution.” These discourses of self-help and autonomy were aimed at shaping disabled subjectivities in the interests of the market, producing auto-regulating subjects that could pull themselves up by their bootstraps (Chaudhry, 2015). My project was informed by intersectionality—in particular, that self-help projects rarely help the most marginalized by poverty, rurality, and disability—and yet, the intersectionality I was investigating also shaped my own positionality in the field and played into my own disability experience. Thus, reflexively navigating through these positionalities became important to my process of knowing. This navigation was not unidirectional, as research participants, interlocutors, and the community together navigated these positionalities with me in the dialogical co-construction of knowledge.

This article examines the possibilities and perils of creating knowledge—including questions of identity, positionality, reflexivity, and gaining similitude—that are involved in doing disability research in nonliberal, non-Western contexts where disability identity is undergoing a process of neoliberal revaluation. Although accounting for the researcher’s own embodied experience of disability is critical for gaining insight into the production of knowledge within disability communities, the presence of disability alone does not suffice to understand disability in transnational contexts where disability may not be a primary vector of identity at the local level. Transnational contexts interpose multiple power dynamics and intersectionalities in the process of doing disability research, and thus call for attendant practices and performative synergies that go beyond liberal disability studies methodologies that privilege identity-centered research practices. ² Although pivotal for articulating disability as a minority category and a socially constructed phenomenon, liberal disability studies tends to essentialize disability as a unitary identity, effacing the salience of intersecting identities and power dynamics.

Drawing upon methodological insights gained from doing ethnographic research between 2006 and 2015 (including living in the field for 2 years) with disability-oriented SHG projects of the World Bank in rural areas of Telangana, I show how sharing a disability identity with research participants was not sufficient to become an insider to the community because disability was not a primary identity that was ascribed to me in the field. My disability was rendered illegible within a community that imbricated disability within broader, multilayered intersections of identity embedded within rural disparities and structural divides. In light of these multiple realities, the liberal model of disability research remained inadequate. Instead, my research demanded qualitative methods rooted in performative, postcolonial, and critical ethnography. To that end, in this article, I elaborate a performative research praxis that entailed social, embodied, and intersubjective co-performances with my informants to articulate a critical analysis of the political economy of disability via consciousness raising inspired by radical methodologies from the genre of critical and performative ethnography (Conquergood, 2002b; Denzin, 2003; Madison, 2005).

This article uses performative ethnography and a reflexive process of autoethnography to expose my own power and privilege, as well as how intersectional identities are enacted within specific research contexts. It also troubles how we think of who is inside and who is outside, what constitutes membership in a group, and how to further address issues of privilege within research. Reflecting on the dynamics of doing disability research in the Global South, it contends with contexts that necessitate a range of research pedagogies, responsibilities, and accountable engagement with communities. Exploring questions of epistemology and ontology that affect the lives of rural disabled subjects in India, it addresses the growing need to understand how critical disability studies can better address research practices in diverse postcolonial contexts. This article as such does not delve into analyzing research findings; it is rather an autoethnographic account of my own embodied experiences of disability as critical for gaining insight into the process of knowledge production.

Tracing Methodological Trajectories: From Liberal Disability Studies to Performance Ethnography

Traditionally, researchers’ presence in the field and their absence in their own texts was an accepted convention in ethnographic writing (Murphy, 1990). Many scholars have asserted that developing ethnography’s experiential reflexivity would necessarily challenge the traditional epistemological grounding of ethnography as a “view from nowhere” (Rabinow, 1977). Critical identity scholars, especially within postcolonial feminist studies and critical disability studies (Goodley, 2014; Harding, 1991; Michalko, 2002; Mohanty, 2003; Reinharz, 1992), have underscored the importance of researchers’ self-reflexivity toward their own subject-position in the process of producing knowledge across identity differences. However, self-reflexivity is only a part of the process of knowledge production. Spivak (2013) reminds us that the bias can go in both directions, and that regardless, bias will affect research. As knowledge is co-produced, it is important to take into account not only how the researcher views the participants but also how the researcher is perceived by the participants. The mutuality of the gaze destabilizes the power of the research encounter and informs what knowledge is produced.

As the epistemological framework of ethnography has been increasingly scrutinized, the liberal (or “second wave”) turn in disability studies has shaped epistemological, pedagogical, and methodological frameworks for disability research in the Global North for over three decades. Drawing upon the social constructionist perspective, it advocates for disabled people to take control of all aspects of knowledge production pertaining to disability (Barnes & Mercer, 1997), pronouncing “nothing about us without us” as its underlying ideology. While being emancipatory, the liberal model ends up essentializing disability as a unitary identity, effacing the salience of intersecting identities (Meekosha & Shuttleworth, 2009). By contrast, critical disability studies (the “third wave”) recognizes the diversity and intersectionality of disability experiences, and calls for critical self-reflexivity, intersectionality, and positionality in decolonizing knowledge (Erevelles, 2011; Goodley, 2014; Shakespeare & Corker, 2002). It draws from postcolonial feminist epistemologies and critical race theories to challenge the essentializing gaze of identity politics, problematizing the politics of representation, voice, agency, and the dynamics of power and privilege shaping global inequalities in postcolonial contexts (Harding, 1991; Mohanty, 2003; Reinharz, 1992; Spivak, 2004, 2013).

In the field of disability research, focus is thus accordingly shifting from a liberal, identity-based framework—the “liberal disability studies” methodology—to a multilayered paradigm to understand deeper intersectionalities and contingencies of disability within multiple cultural categories and power dynamics (Addlakha & Das, 2001; Grech & Soldatic, 2016). Although attentive to complex power arrangements, this paradigm has yet to fully account for the realities of disability in postcolonial contexts. Postcolonial disability scholars (Addlakha, 2013; Anand, 2013; Ghai, 2002; Mehrotra, 2012) point out the paucity of studies and the slow pace of research initiatives within critical disability studies in postcolonial contexts. There is even lesser attention devoted to methodological issues—matters of epistemology, ontology, and positionality—involved in doing disability research in these sites (Addlakha, 2013; Anand, 2013; Ghai, 2002; Mehrotra, 2012).

In the Indian context, there has been a growing discussion around the politics of knowledge production in disability research (Ghosh, 2012; Mehrotra, 2012; Vaidya, 2010). Highlighting “scholarly colonialism” (Meekosha, 2008), the literature critiques the problematic incorporation of disability theory and methods from the Global North and calls for decolonizing knowledge, grounded within local cultural specificities (Addlakha, 2013; Anand, 2013; Ghai, 2002). In addition to the positionality and locality of the researcher, complex dynamics are thrown up by regional, caste, class, and other intersectionalities within which disability is imbricated. Furthermore, most disability research is conducted in urban rather than rural areas, where most disabled Indians reside (Ghosh, 2012; Mehrotra, 2012).

While there has been a move toward activist and insider scholarship within the burgeoning field of critical disability studies in India and elsewhere—with growing numbers of disabled scholars conducting research on disability issues—I argue that researchers’ own experience of disability may not be sufficient to grasp the disability experience, as disability is enmeshed within different constitutive axes of identity. This means that understanding disability experience is gained not only through reflexivity, but also through the dimension of performance. As a methodological orientation, performance ethnography pays attention to the processes of doing and becoming identity and culture. It does so by acknowledging that scholarly representations are a product of specific interactions as well as the cognitive understandings that both the researcher and researched bring to the fieldwork encounter (Conquergood, 1998).

Addressing the power dynamics of research and knowledge, performance ethnography is a methodological paradigm asserting that interpretations of reality are constructed through a dialogical process of engagement between researcher and research subjects (Conquergood, 1998, 2002b; Denzin, 2003; Madison, 2005). It implicates the researcher’s reflexivity within a processual and dynamic reality of dialogic exchange with research subjects. Instead of focusing on structures, patterns, and products, performance ethnography studies performances that are produced by, and produce, social structures and patterns themselves (Madison, 2005). Conquergood (1986) reminds us that “meaning is produced in-between the structures, and identity is conjectural and processual” (p. 36). Performance ethnography thus pays attention to the processes of doing identity and culture, and the “process of becoming” involved in the changing and evolving dynamic of human relationships in and through research (Conquergood, 1986).

To that end, performance ethnography posits three interrelated methodological stages in the ethnographic encounter: mimesis, poiesis, and kinesis. Mimesis is a performance in which the researcher learns by mirroring cultural norms and conventions. In poiesis, the researcher comes to and performs a deeper understanding of meaning and affect through pragmatic experiences of how things are done or constructed in everyday life. Finally, kinesis is a performance of change, an intervention that has political effects by redefining the meaning of action (Conquergood, 1998; Denzin, 2003).

In what follows, I elaborate upon these three dialectically interrelated stages of performance ethnography and the ways in which I used performance ethnography to navigate diverse positionalities in the process of co-constructing knowledge in fieldwork. Exploring emergent dialectics of sameness and difference, I begin by highlighting the tensions in establishing similitude with research participants owing to our differential positionality across intersectional lines. Next, I elaborate the various performative practices—in the repertoire of performance ethnography—I used for negotiating these differences. My discussion of mimesis examines the possibilities and perils of cultural immersion and learning social conventions in the process of building similitude and the limitations of the liberal model of disability identity this experience reveals. The second stage, poiesis, foregrounds an instance of embodied vulnerability—the accidental act of tripping—as a catalyst for creatively articulating a shared horizon of disability with members of the disability and development community. In the final stage, “kinesis,” I discuss the possibilities for dialogical political consciousness raising that resulted equally from this irruptive act of tripping and from my extended political engagement in the disability self-help groups. In “kinesis,” my informants and I forged a radical space in which to understand the complicity between political economic inequalities and the pressing materiality of disabled embodiment.

Drawing from critical disability studies and performance ethnography, this article presents a performative research praxis that highlights the methodological challenges and opportunities of doing disability research in postcolonial contexts. This methodological intervention also contributes to an ongoing discussion concerning the direction and future of disability research at large. Although critical disability studies and performance ethnography are connected through their emphasis on embodiment, and, more particularly, the body as a mode of experience and a mode of power, intersectionality, and reflexivity, they are not often brought into conversation with each other (Goodley & Runswick-Cole, 2012; Kuppers, 2014; Scott, 2015). Thus, one of my contributions in this article is to bring these two epistemological and methodological frameworks together to think through ways we can democratize and decolonize the process of knowledge production to create knowledge which is culturally accountable and politically engaged. I now turn to the methodological challenges and opportunities that unfolded over various stages of the performative research process.

A Failure of Disability Identity: The Politics of Difference and Disavowal

On my entrance into the field, disabled participants did not perceive me as a person with a disability. I was not considered disabled enough because of my class, race/ethnicity and regional background (being from North India and working in South India), color (being lighter skinned), international institutional location, and coming from an urban background. My identity as a visually disabled woman from India was not considered sufficient enough for my inclusion in the disability community in the context of rural South India. My identity was unmarked as a disabled person, for disability in the context of rurality in South India was qualified by extreme marginality.

In rural South India, disability was understood within the framework of incapacity and dependency. In villages, disability was primarily seen as a “limitation” (Badha) that affected one’s ability to work and be mobile. Disability shaped, and was shaped by, economic, social, and political conditions. Disability was not only a biological fact. Location counted, as well as caste, class, and other axes of power that altogether work to constitute the disablement process (Erb & Harriss-White, 2002; Lang, 2001; Mehrotra, 2013). Access to inclusive education and employment opportunities for disabled people was few and far between, reinforcing their marginal status in the community. Moreover, the common perception about visual disability in rural areas was that visually impaired people could not go to schools, and thus were unable to read or write. As special and inclusive educational institutions were mostly based in cities and towns far from villages, disabled people in general—and visually disabled in particular—largely remained devoid of educational opportunities.

As disability research and intervention in India (particularly in rural India) has been an a priori domain of nondisabled researchers and professionals (Ghosh, 2012; Mehrotra, 2012), it was unusual for them to see a person with disability doing disability research. More pointedly, it was unusual for the community to see a person with visual disability pursuing higher education and research, given the structural, cultural, and embodied barriers to social mobility in rural areas. The fact that visual disability could be mitigated through assistive information technology like screen reading software also did not fit within their horizon of possibilities. The lack of educational and technological infrastructure in rural areas produced a digital divide so deep that only the wealthiest had access to computers and information technology. The assistive tools and screen reading technology that I used were out of my disabled interlocutors’ reach. Thus, instead of signifying accessibility, such tools and devices signified privilege and power. The high-tech assistive technology was ill-suited to local material and cultural conditions, representing yet another intersectional manifestation of a structural socioeconomic divide.

For disabled interlocutors, I was not disabled in the same way they understood and experienced disability. The experience and remediation of my disability was not legible to them in terms of the categories of disability experience that they could relate to. To the contrary, I was seen as “mobile” both physically and socially, with access to networks of power and stakeholders that they considered influential, including state authorities, senior officials, and governmental and nongovernmental disability organizations. Furthermore, I was perceived as “someone from outside,” where multiple “outsides”—such as Delhi, my place of origin, and the United States, my place of work—coalesced into a multivalent identification with unseen yet imagined national and international centers of power. These boundary-crossings perplexed community members about my country of origin and education. Although I repeatedly asserted my country of origin as India, they associated me with the United States.

What compounded the estrangement of my disability identity was the relative invisibility of my disability. Initially, the community was unable to discern the extent of my vision impairment. My legal blindness often went unnoticed and my disclosure was typically met with surprise and suspicion. With time, the community became aware of my lack of visual acuity. However, with disabled interlocutors, it was not the biological reality that they had trouble discerning, it was the sociological reality that they could not connect with. For them, my visual impairment was merely a biological characteristic, which did not necessarily carry the connotation of a handicap. As one of them remarked, “everything is fine with you, except for your vision.” As the intersectional nature of their disability experience affected their quality of life, their perception about “everything being fine” with me indicated the inseparability—indeed, the constitutive and mutual imbrication—of disability with local material life chances.

Given our intersectional differences, I was not considered disabled by my interlocutors even when our impairment realities were similar. Establishing a synergetic connection with my participants across our diverse intersectional positionalities—to connect from a place of shared experiential insight—required a performance of my disability as proof of authentic belonging in the community. This entailed a process of “doing and becoming” an insider through performance ethnography. Instead of seeing identity and culture as static, performance ethnography pays attention to the processual doing of culture, first exemplified by gaining familiarity with cultural norms and practices or building cultural synergy through the first stage of performance ethnography, mimesis. Mimesis is the “process of becoming” that evolves through participant-observation as a dynamic and changing set of human relationships (Conquergood, 1986). In the following discussion, I describe various ways in which this process unfolded by exploring the importance of, and experiences in learning the language, cultural norms and traditions, gender and castes systems, and rural infrastructures. This also illuminates the importance of disabled researchers’ explorations of their own positionalities other than disability.

Mimesis: Building Cultural Synergy

Building synergy was a performative process, entailing social performances—sets of actions or enactments based on the cultural script—that represent a culture’s particular symbolic practices (Turner, 1982). Thus, my initial effort was to align my behavior with culturally scripted norms, practices, interactions, rules and enactments guiding everyday life in the community, what Conquergood (1998) terms “mimesis.” Identification with cultural practices fostered a sense of belonging, gradually allowing me to grasp the life-world of the disabled community. This included upholding practices of sociality and relationality—including norms around gender, embodiment, and disability—among others. As it unfolded, this performative praxis revealed unexpected contradictions.

In ethnographic research, the characteristics and positionality of the researcher affect the entire experience of researching—what the researcher is allowed to see, what the researcher notices and is told, and what conclusions the researcher draws (Townsend, 1999). As much as I wanted to learn about the community and the development projects, project staff and the community members were equally interested to learn about my life worlds. The community wanted to connect with me, unspooling different facets of my personhood to trust me before they opened up and spoke to me. Their curiosity was often accompanied by confusion: confusion about my disability (as it was not visible at times), confusion about my country of origin and country of education, curiosity about my research, as well as my identity as a single woman. This early stage of fieldwork was marked by my attempts—often borne out with excitement and frustration—to learn the local language and culture by mirroring cultural norms.

The local villagers’ curiosity became more pronounced at the intersections of gender and disability. Culturally, it was uncommon for an Indian woman to be living by herself in a new place away from her family. And when young women did live by themselves, it seldom happened in rural areas. In line with traditional heteronormative cultural norms, young women lived with their maiden families before marriage, and after marriage with their husband’s family. These cultural realities shaped my decision about where to live in the community. As it was considered neither culturally appropriate nor safe for a single woman to live alone, I decided to live with a local family, who rented a portion of their house to me. The family belonged to a relatively dominant caste in the area and the head of the household was in the business of digging bore wells, one of the most lucrative trades in a drought-prone district like Mahabubnagar. My host family did not know Hindi or English, the only languages I spoke fluently. However, they became my self-appointed language gurus, teaching me Telugu, the local language of Andhra Pradesh. My language education started as sign language exchange between my host family and me; we quickly accelerated to small talk. I memorized new words every day and practiced my acquired vocabulary with local community members, sometimes evoking laughter at my linguistic blunders.

In addition to helping me learn the language, my host family oriented me to local cultural norms and practices that prevailed in domestic and public spheres. In a culture that was collectivist and kinship-oriented, being embedded within a family defrayed the cultural stigma of a woman being by herself and reduced my vulnerability as a single woman. Gradually, I became part of the family—partaking in food, space, and conviviality—and sharing in their life-world by participating in their cultural rituals and family celebrations.

Given the centrality of family in social construction of personhood, the presence of my family members during the initial stages of fieldwork also helped to align me within the social order. Similar observations have been made regarding the role and importance of family members in ethnographic research (Brown & Casanova, 2010; Johnston, 2013). Although my father initially accompanied me to the field to help me make logistical arrangements—finding a place of residence and getting situated in a new locale—I quickly realized that his presence in the field, even briefly, was commensurate with cultural norms of gender and familiality. In the context of a patriarchal regional culture, having my father in the field established social boundaries of propriety and provided security for me to conduct my research. Seeing me within my family context and not only as a researcher enabled people to appreciate different facets of my personhood. This was particularly important within the Indian context, where people are interested in knowing the person in their entirety, and where boundaries between private and public life are less rigid. This perspective strengthened my positionality as a familial being, and following these norms of sociality also helped me in gaining social legitimacy and cultural synergy. Embedding various facets of personhood within local cultural practices was integral to the process of mimesis—the first stage of performance ethnography.

Yet local access and social inclusion also meant being able to navigate not merely the cultural landscape, but the political and physical landscapes as well. The staff of local governmental and nongovernmental disability organizations facilitated my initial entry to the community, imparted familiarity with the region and rural landscapes, and assisted me in accessing basic necessities and disability accommodations. Although organizational staff provided initial support, this support carried contradictory effects, as it inadvertently aligned me with state power and its apparatuses. Initially, people associated me with the organization, in the process orienting themselves toward me in a hierarchical manner. However, as my research progressed, the community became aware of my ideological and political perspectives through our direct engagement and dialogical critique of power and oppression. This shared antioppressive vision created the grounds for a synergetic political perspective to emerge between me and the disability community.

Managing disability access was integral to my fieldwork process. My host family, the organizational staff, and the community all provided unconditional support toward making my fieldwork as accessible as possible by extending assistance with basic logistics and disability accommodations. For example, my host family often escorted me in the village when it was dark, when the few street lights made uneven roads and pavements inaccessible at night. In rural areas, the housing infrastructure was tied up with material resources that were largely determined by caste-class positionality. My host family’s house was among one of the few modernized houses in the village, and was accessible with infrastructural amenities including an inbuilt toilet, which was not common in rural areas. Given that accessible housing was contingent on intersectional privileges, I ended up residing in an upper-caste household due to my disability needs, even though I had not initially planned on doing so. Despite my initial reservations about this decision, this experience provided close insights into understanding local dynamics of power and patronage in the village.

Disability, space, and embodiment interacted in a unique way to deepen experiences of debility and dependence in rural landscapes. Uneven and inaccessible geography in villages did not take into account the limitations of mobility for disabled people. Dilapidated roads, unpaved paths, sporadic availability of running water and electricity, open drainage, and other sanitation failures all contributed to ecological hardships for the rural public collectively, and for disabled subjects in particular. Normative rural embodiment demanded subjects’ capacities of able-bodiedness, improvisation, and adaptation to survive the uneven environments reproduced by structural disparities and poverty. As Grech (2015) notes, spaces of poverty are not built for ill-health and impaired bodies, and disabled bodies therefore materialize uniquely in these contexts. Navigating rural rugged terrain demanded physical and sensorial dexterity from its inhabitants, reproducing dispensations of capacity and debility in the process. These spaces were in turn intersectionally shaped by a person’s position across class, caste, gender, impairment, and other power structures. Disabled people who belonged to upper caste-class communities had easy access to material resources—including concrete houses, inbuilt toilets, private transportation, running water, and electricity—that mitigated experiences of disability embodiment. This reified connections between disability and development or, more properly, the lack of development (Erb & Harriss-White, 2002).

Given such challenges, accessing the scarce necessities of daily living hinged upon one’s level of relational and material resources. Within the rural Indian context, access was facilitated through relationships and was invoked as a collective experience. Put differently, the disabled body and its senses were experienced to the degree they became permeable to the family and community. The family and kinship network of disabled people facilitated visual, physical, and sensorial access to the world. For example, during my fieldwork, I never came across blind people using white canes, for they were always escorted by their kin and community members. Similarly, there were no motorized wheelchairs, but rather manually operated tricycles (hand-operated wheelchairs with three wheels) that were cheaper and better suited for the rural landscape. Most of the time, community members helped in pushing tricycles through rough and rugged village roads and terrains. Relatives and neighbors also helped their disabled peers with everyday chores, such as collecting wood from farms and forests, fetching water from the well, or standing in long queues to get drinking water from the taps that supplied fresh water at only certain times in the day.

Having grown up in urban locales, I had taken these amenities for granted such that securing basic necessities was an unaccustomed, ongoing challenge. This made me acutely aware of the rural–urban divide and the privilege that came with my class and location. Although ecological and structural frailties interacted with my visual impairment in a unique way to create an embodied experience of dependency, the interdependent cultural ethos made navigating these frailties less daunting. As interdependence was the norm in collectivist culture of rural Telangana, I received tremendous support through what I call socially mediated access networks, or social networks of accessibility. Over time, these social networks of accessibility grew stronger as organizational staff, my host family, the disability and broader communities and I together formed bonds of friendship and trust.

More importantly, as I explicate below, shared moments of disability vulnerability in navigating fraught local infrastructure created experiences of embodiment that helped me to gain deeper levels of meaning and affect and experience the second stage of performance ethnography, “poiesis” (Conquergood, 1998). My momentary loss of navigational independence helped the community to see me independently from the NGO and state-based organizations, creating a radical space of shared disability consciousness. I now turn to the dynamics of poiesis and the processes it entailed in building similitude with the disability community through shared embodiment.

Performing Disability as Poiesis: Building Similitude Through Shared Embodiment

Shared experiences of embodied vulnerability allowed for the development of similitude, which meant not only being present with disabled people in their precarious contexts but also experiencing disability barriers myself, and the concomitant loss of control that accompanied these moments. Such challenges became performative stages that diffused hierarchies, allowing me to become a member of the disability community and to be perceived as a person with disability by the community. In these moments and through these actions, I accessed deeper levels of meaning and affect, experiencing the second stage of performance ethnography, “poiesis” (Conquergood, 1998). Poiesis, as a performance, seeks to understand deeper levels of meaning and affect through engaged action—“doing”—in the construction of meaning—“becoming.” For me, this meant performing disability, in all its corporeal entailments, to “become” meaningfully and intelligibly disabled both for my informants and for myself. Thus, over time, my experiences of disability embodiment ruptured our initial dissimilitude invoked by my intersectional privileges. These co-productions of similitude came at various performative moments involving failures of access resulting from the interaction of my visual impairment and the navigation of environmental barriers in rural landscapes. These embodied performances in the time-space of rurality made possible the becoming and doing of my disability identity, which had heretofore remained blurred and invisible to the disabled community.

As I was clearly perceived as a disabled person when I experienced access barriers, these performative moments were also moments of co-constructed similitude with my disabled interlocutors. These performative moments of disability embodiment unfolded as I participated in and with disabled people in their life worlds: moments when I could not navigate the street puddles, jutting stones on unpaved roads, or if I stumbled or tripped due to the poor lighting, as well as times when I needed assistance in reading the bus/train numbers and other textual information in public spaces and elsewhere. Rupturing the carapace of intersectional privilege, these moments opened up liminal and radically democratic time-spaces of connection through poiesis. As the disabled body writ large manifested itself in these moments, performances of symbolic bodily practices created a radically shared space of disability. We began experiencing similar barriers, and as we began navigating through those barriers together, we entered into the intersubjective realm of experience through embodiment.

According to Conquergood (2002a, 2002b), embodied practices constitute knowledge, emotion, and creation. What he calls “radical empiricism” is an embodied mode of being together with others on intersubjective ground. He adds, “Instead of the idea of experience pressing out to expression, we must remember that we know experience through the body. It is the embodied expression that organizes experience” (Conquergood, 1982a, p. 85). Here, I draw upon Conquergood’s “embodied practices” to think through my experience of tripping and the forms of sociality it unfolded for me and my fellow disabled interlocutors. My experience of “tripping” (described in the beginning of this article) reminded the community of my disability, shifting the way I was being perceived between registers of difference and sameness. Tripping became an embodied mode of being together with disabled interlocutors in an intersubjective space of disability. It opened up an intersubjective space from which a shared meaning of disability and solidarity could be created. Thus, my tripping (and other such embodied practices) were moments of “radical empiricism,” revealing embodiment as a mode of connecting personal and political stances through intersubjectivity. Tripping enabled my positionality as an insider, as a failure of access opened up a time-space of shared embodied vulnerabilities, and articulated a point of rupture around which I could build similitude with the participants. While tripping was caused by lack of access, it simultaneously facilitated my access to the disability community. Tripping was then a hermeneutic encounter, an intersubjective moment to recover partial yet shared subject-positions.

The moment of tripping reveals a corporeal vulnerability and indexes the materiality of risk which, as an aspect entailed by the practice of performance ethnography, allows for disability to become a vector of shared identity rather than an axis of differentiation between the researcher and the community. The vulnerability of tripping involves a disclosure—a performance of disability. I, the researcher, in that moment of performativity, was no longer the bearer of hierarchy; rather, in the moment of tripping, I became objectified partly through the vulnerability being displayed through the manifest risk materialized in tripping. Initially, my visual impairment was not coded as a disability by the disability community, because of the inequality of the gazes and their apprehension about my possible association with the state apparatus. Therefore, the performativity of tripping worked as a dramatic moment precisely because their fears of difference, revolving around unequal gazes, were dissipated.

Thus, the instance of tripping signified poiesis, the doing and becoming of my disability, as well as understanding disability as a shared experience. This apparent access failure, along with several others, opened up an emotive register to recognize shared, yet heretofore tacitly overlooked, embodied experiences of disability. Tripping was an affective encounter that opened up a space-time of forgetting and remembering, generating disability similitude and the effect of cultural authenticity. These hermeneutic performances fostered deeper connections with disabled subjects based on a shared sense of critical engagement and nonnormative embodiment. The political possibilities unfolded by the performativity of “tripping” also illuminates the dialectical interplay of meaning and action. As I explicate below, this form of hermeneutic engagement required participating in and with them in their life worlds, not as a distant observer, but as a co-performer, from a place of intimate involvement and political commitment. This political commitment took the form of the third methodological stage of performance ethnography—“kinesis,” or co-performance as consciousness raising—to which I turn next.

Co-Performance and Political Participation as Modalities of Kinesis

Kinesis is a point at which reflection and meaning evoke change and intervention. Kinesis is a performance of change, intervention, and subversion that has political effects (Conquergood, 1997). At this point, performance ethnography moves to question and resist regimes of power. As a political performance, it is aimed at unraveling power structures through a praxis of co-performance, dialogical engagement, and the development of critical consciousness raising through forging radical solidarities. Co-performance as a dialogical performance means not only doing what subjects do, that is, participant observation—the mainstay of traditional ethnography—but also being intellectually and relationally engaged in their meaning-making processes, experiencing with them their desires and concerns (Madison, 2005). As a co-performer, the researcher travels empathically to the world of subjects, as traversing their world with them enlivens relationships and generates critical insights into their consciousness and context, to “know and feel some of what they know and feel” (Madison, 2005, p. 175). According to Conquergood (1997, 2002b), co-performance is a “doing with” that carries a deep level of commitment based on shared power. This commitment is informed by political praxis that seeks to critique, unravel, and challenge regimes of power and oppression to create radical alternatives (Denzin, 2003).

Spending time with disabled participants in their everyday lives allowed me to understand the incongruities between disabled people’s needs and the services provided by the self-help group project. I traveled to various rural districts and villages to participate in disability self-help group activities and other development projects. As villages were located at long distances, I often stayed with disabled group members for weeks in locations far from my base village. Attending SHG meetings and cultural festivals, and accompanying them to government offices, hospitals, medical camps, and other institutions helped in understanding the possibilities and obstacles they experienced, the manner in which they embodied and resisted disablement processes, and the effects of self-help group participation on their material and subjective lives.

The individualizing, privatizing nature of interventions became more legible as we participated in various disability interventions initiated by neoliberal development projects. As a co-performer, I critically traversed my informants’ worlds with them as we illuminated the disconnect between the structural nature of rural disablement and the individual interventions promoted by the neoliberal SHG model. While their concerns were structurally and historically shaped, the interventions provided by the SHGs were individually oriented in here-and-now. Neoliberal discourses translated into approaches that focused on correcting the body through medical interventions and structural poverty through market-led microfinance approaches. Metastasizing poverty, microfinance loans were geared toward promoting entrepreneurship among disabled people through small loans that were bundled with group monitoring processes. However, the entrepreneurial model of microfinance remained inequitable for disabled people in light of large scale structural disadvantages, inaccessible livelihoods, and agrarian distress, coupled with intersectional marginalization. Reproducing debt and debility, microfinance only benefitted those who were intersectionally privileged vis-à-vis cast, class, gender, land, and impairment-type (Chaudhry, 2016).

Interacting with them in their life worlds opened up possibilities for us to have context-specific discussions locating their experiences of disability within the irruptive materiality of cultural time-space. For example, I had several ethnographic conversations with my disabled participants while traveling in inaccessible public buses and auto rickshaws, where they spontaneously shared their disability experiences vis-à-vis dilapidated rural infrastructure and poverty. What helped in fostering trust and similitude was collectively experiencing disability barriers as we navigated rural landscapes—broken and unpaved roads, unexpected potholes that were hard to see in inadequate lighting. These experiences illuminated a general sense of inaccessibility that was part and parcel of remote rural spatiality. Experiencing disability barriers on the field together with disabled participants allowed us to embody a space of shared life worlds, not through the objective gaze of distant observations, but rather through emergent entailments of corporeal vulnerability and “co-performance” (Conquergood, 1982b).

Experiential bonding took place as we experienced similar disability barriers in accessing these arenas. My visual disability then became a point of rupture, facilitating the embodied engagement of radical empiricism, which was aimed at incorporating rather than gazing over (Madison, 2005). Shared disability experience helped not only to translate, but also transcend, linguistic and cultural boundaries. This hermeneutic approach allowed for co-construction of disability experience, letting us delve deeply into issues of disability embodiment, and the possibilities and constraints of neoliberal development model. Participants became more comfortable interacting freely with me and with each other, discussing their disabilities and how they navigate spatialized inequalities of access. These discussions opened up dialogical spaces to think critically about neoliberal self-help group project. Engaging in these political discourses not only created a shared space of disability, but also moments of reflection and consciousness raising around politics of disability and development—instances of performative “kinesis”—as I further explicate below.

Kinesis Through Dialogical Engagement, Co-Constructing Critical Consciousness and Knowledge

Sharing my own experiences of disability barriers and exclusions allowed for a dialogic exchange in which participants felt validated about their stigmatized experiences of nonnormative embodiment. Positioning myself as a researcher with disability was essential in building affective intimacy, cocreating a safe space free from a normalizing and ableist gaze, and was thus political. While establishing similitude, I often shared with disabled subjects about my visual disability and discussed ways in which it had ontologically shaped my disability research. Although our seemingly different disability worlds (Ginsburg & Rapp, 2013) initially appeared to have little in common, over time, we recognized distinct yet common barriers we experienced in our own disability worlds. These barriers became the common ground for dialogic hermeneutic connection, upon which we built a radical and shared space of solidarity. These dialogic conversations made participants feel more at ease disclosing challenges that impeded and conditioned their opportunities.

I would often share examples of ableism in academia or discuss my access barriers in the Global North to elicit their experiences of disability. For example, I shared with them my experiences of digital disability—access barriers experienced in navigating information with screen readers in the era of growing digitalization (Chaudhry & Shipp, 2005). I would explain how mere access to technology did not guarantee inclusion, as majority of websites and online portals were not fully designed to be accessible with screen reader technologies. As a visually disabled person, Living in a highly digital environment of academia in the United States with partially accessible technology was thus also replete with barriers for me. The fact that digital divide could still exist even given relative privilege through access to assistive technology became a common ground for us to co-construct disability experiences. They would ask about my disability experiences—my access barriers, gendered nature of inclusions and exclusions I experienced owing to my vision impairment. In turn, they opened up and freely shared about the socioeconomic barriers they experienced and how these stemmed from lack of development, inaccessible livelihood opportunities, and physical infrastructure that all deepened their everyday experiences of debility. Although digital disability did not resonate directly with their own material and cultural realities of rural disability, it fostered solidarity by opening a conversation that considered disability embodiment from an ecological perspective. Co-constructing disability by reflecting on shared vulnerabilities and ecological barriers, our discussions began to revolve around disablement processes, illuminating cultural attitudes and perceptions pertaining to nonnormative embodiment.

These radical political spaces offered opportunities for linking ideological synergy to embodiment and consciousness. Disabled subjects thus started encouraging each other to share their narratives with me, as they began viewing the research as co-constructing knowledge, a process in which they had stakes in determining what kind of disability knowledge was being produced, and by whom. They felt the need to contribute and construct and not simply inform. Participants articulated their feelings of trust, responsibility, and support of me and my project. They stated their commitments by saying, “We must tell her, she also has disability . . . she will not judge us. Her work will help disability in the village.”

Recognizing constraints and imagining possibilities, these conversations opened up an interrogative field imbued with pedagogical possibilities. As Madison (2005) puts it, “an interrogative field is the point at which the performance of possibilities aims to create or contribute to a discursive space where unjust systems and processes are identified and interrogated” (p. 174). This interrogative field then facilitated critical consciousness raising about the possibilities and paradoxes of neoliberal development programs. Dialectically moving between personal and political, our discussions opened up toward structural injustices and their effects on disability, including connections between disability and development, how disability was socially constructed, and how dilapidated infrastructure (such as broken roads, poor lighting, housing, and transportation) was inaccessible for disabled people. The intersections of disability and poverty were deeply felt by disabled people and their communities, and were articulated in terms of “social suffering” (Das et al., 2001) interconnected nature of broad and particular suffering and - the shared pain that interconnection co-generates. In these conversations, participants situated their disability within capitalist structures of power and domination, thus recognizing the entanglements of disability, poverty, and neoliberal development projects of the World Bank.

Mapping out the politics of disability and neoliberal development in the region, these discussions opened up discursive spaces for critical thinking, recognition, and meaning-making—in other words, spaces of quotidian politics—of how daily life is affected by political realities. Deconstructing neoliberal assemblages of market-led development approaches, disabled participants shared critical insights about microfinance and other interventions that focused on individual change and responsibilization. Participants reflected on broader socioeconomic issues related to disability, caste, gender, and uneven development, and then returned to think critically about neoliberal development projects from a broader contextual vantage point. Reflecting on self-help orientation of disability interventions, such as microfinance and community-based rehabilitation, disabled interlocutors described these interventions as “apolitical” as they provided “immediate, short-term solutions” for structural problems. They instead invoked the welfare state to intervene—asking for higher “disability pensions” (social security), and for the state to invest in inclusive and sustainable development in the villages. In doing so, disabled people challenged financialization configuring political claims, solidarities, resistances, and radical dependencies that “cripped” the neoliberal ethics of entrepreneurial subjectivity.

In line with critical ethnography, this dialogic approach entailed critical engagement, reflection, and consciousness raising (Madison, 2005). This occurred in phases, moving across and between different stages—project-specific to structural realities of rural disablement. This allowed the participants to respond freely without the fear of being judged or evaluated. Moreover, these dialogic conversations enabled participants to distance themselves from the ideological mold of disability self-help projects and explore alternative possibilities for emancipatory sociality. Taking place outside the time-space of formal project meetings, these conversations were organic, and generated a critical dialogue about links between disability and development that produced dilapidated infrastructure and cultural marginalization.

Thus, in “kinesis,” a reintegration of consciousness on a new plane allowed for the creation of a shared radical space wherein intersectional differences were bracketed and transcended, fostering a shared community understanding of the complicity between political economic inequalities and the pressing materiality of disabled embodiment. This performative praxis of kinesis had political effects, generating critical awareness, recognition, and the subversion of neoliberal ideologies among disabled participants. Political discourses empowered participants and generated solidarity. The structural analysis of disability embodiment allowed for connecting personal with political, creating a shared space of disability. In those moments of emergent political disability solidarity, intersectional differences softened and melted away. Co-constructing critical disability consciousness by linking embodiment and ideology fostered synergy and a form of collective intersubjectivity.

In closing, performance ethnography allowed me and my interlocutors to co-construct disability knowledge and build synergy. Performance ethnography asserts that research itself, as a mode of co-constructing life worlds, is a political intervention. Thus, performance ethnography departs from the traditional anthropological view in which participation through participant-observation is merely a means to an end. Instead, this article takes participation as something that in itself constructs a social field and shapes and reshapes social, cultural, and embodied relations, with political consequences. This radical performative praxis is especially productive in co-constructing knowledge and navigating various axes of identity and positionality in postcolonial contexts imbued with power inequities. As explicated in this article, constructing knowledge was a performative process that unfolded in different and unexpected ways over the course of my research. It began with the performance of cultural norms through the process of mimesis, then moved to a deeper level of meaning with the performance of disability embodiment through poiesis, and culminated into a critique of neoliberal disability projects and building radical political solidarities through kinesis. These three stages were dialectically connected and constitutive of each other.

Conclusion

Bringing the methodology of performance ethnography to bear on the disciplinary concerns of critical disability studies, this article illuminates the epistemological complexities involved in democratizing and decolonizing disability knowledge(s). The article pushes against simplistic liberal disability studies research with and by those with disabilities. Advancing methods and methodological discussions through exposing the inadequacies of the liberal disability studies methodology focused on identity as its organizing principle, the article draws upon critical performative ethnography to explore the role and importance of intersectionality and performativity in the process of knowledge production. It also troubles how we think of who is inside and who is outside, what constitutes membership in a group, and how to further address issues of power and privilege within research. Based on my ethnographic experiences of doing disability research as a disabled halfie over several years in rural South India, I show how identity-centered research pedagogies remained inchoate in co-constructing knowledge, for researchers with disabilities may not become insiders to the disability community on the grounds of their disability status alone. Reflexively examining and addressing my own privilege, I instead drew upon qualitative methods rooted in performative, postcolonial, and critical ethnography to co-construct knowledge that is culturally accountable and politically engaged. To that end, in this article, I elaborate a performative research praxis that entails social, embodied, and intersubjective co-performances with my research subjects, building embodied synergy to articulate a critical analysis of disability.