Feeling the Field: Disconcertment, Epistemic Adhesion and Profound Intellectual and Multiple Disabilities

This paper draws on two affectively charged fieldwork encounters in a Swedish daily activity centre for persons with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD) to explore how affect intervenes in fieldwork and reconfigures what becomes knowable. Situated within Science and Technology Studies (STS), the analysis reflects on how moments of discomfort, intimacy, and apprehension unsettle a research orientation initially shaped by material semiotics, prompting renewed attention to questions of complicity and the epistemic terms of practice-oriented analysis. Rather than treating affect as noise or private response, it is approached as a register through which broader histories of segregation and exclusion become palpable in the encounter. Tracing how affect shapes what is registered as relevant or knowable, the paper develops epistemic adhesion as a conceptual companion to disconcertment-understood here as moments of felt epistemic disruption-to name the ease or alignment through which dominant orientations are affirmed rather than troubled. In attending to how disability is rendered affectively and epistemically available, the analysis offers a situated reflection on the stakes of knowing-and not knowing-with PIMD.