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

Abstract

This article reflects on a performative praxis entailing cultural, symbolic, embodied, and political processes involved in negotiating difference and sameness from the perspective of doing disability research in India as a disabled “halfie.” Based on my own disability experience that disrupted binaries between insider and outsider, I argue that researchers’ disability identities themselves may not be sufficient for becoming an insider to the disability community, due to varying intersectional and cultural contexts. Exposing inadequacies of the liberal disability studies methodology in the social sciences, I draw from critical qualitative methods rooted in performative, postcolonial, and critical ethnography to address questions of positionality and reflexivity, facilitating similitude and knowledge production.