Cripping Collaboration: Science Fiction and the Access to Disability Worlds

Inclusive participatory approaches strive to make participants with mild intellectual disabilities (MID) co-researchers. However, academic standards of knowledge production and the need for cognitive skills can complicate collaboration. I argue that collaboration with people with disabilities is not about efforts of inclusion, but instead, it is our methodologies that need to be "cripped." This means moving away from the ideal of inclusion, toward a more interdependent and relational understanding of access and collaboration. This multimodal article shows how my "research subject" Olof and I explored this way of working together by describing the coproduction of the science-fiction film "O."