Abstract
Drawing on a posthuman onto-epistemology, this paper explores movements of bodies labelled-as-disabled as creative ‘choreographies’ that are coproduced through the coming together of multiple material, social, discursive and affective forces across time-spaces. The purpose is to challenge thinking as usual towards re-envisioning differences as potentials rather than deficits. To do so, we consider how disability can move deficit-thinking and how mobility can be put to work to rethink disability. Movement and mobility in relation to disability are frequently discussed in terms of bodily deficits and/or disabling access barriers. Deficit-thinking separates people into categories of disabled or so-called ‘abled’ wherein reforms are oriented to erasure of differences through providing disabled people with access to a normal/ized life. In this posthuman analysis we advance an affirmative way of thinking about differences by recursively retheorizing disability through movement and retheorizing movement through disability. To do so we present three ‘mobility experiments’ generated from a recent study conducted with five youth partners who identified as disabled. Within the experiments, we position creative mobilities as micro-activist becomings that suggest avenues for celebrating differences towards instigating radical change. We conclude with a discussion of posthuman disability ethics and the implications of our analysis for thinking and doing differently in healthcare and beyond.
Movement and mobility in relation to disability are most frequently discussed in terms of bodily deficits and/or disabling access barriers. In this paper we draw on a posthuman onto-epistemology to view movements of bodies labelled-as-disabled as creative choreographies coproduced in congress with sociomaterial forces. We do so to instigate affirmative ways of being and doing that recognize difference as emergent, existent and carrying potential. Our analysis draws from a recent study in which we partnered with a group of young people who identify as disabled to re-envision differences as potentials rather than deficits. Deficit-thinking separates people into categories of ‘disabled’ or ‘abled’ and organizes a host of activities oriented to normalization (Goodley and Runswick-Cole, 2014; Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2010; Titchkosky, 2009). Normalization goals are not always problematic, but constrain how disability is understood and contribute to ‘damage-centred’ narratives that are similarly (and unevenly) associated with, for example, racialization, colonization and cisnormativity (Rosiek and Kinslow, 2015; Tuck and Yang, 2014). Our focus on movement and mobility works to extend scholarship in disability studies to shift deficit-thinking and reposition disability as valuable, disruptive and dynamic (Hamraie and Fritsch, 2019; Liddiard et al., 2024; Rice et al., 2024). We consider how disability can move deficit-thinking and how mobility can be put to work to rethink disability.
Movement in medicine and rehabilitation is framed in terms of kinematics, the physical displacement of a human body or a body part in objective space. Along these lines, mobility is framed as purpose driven movement, an objective to be realized whether it be, for example, walking 10 steps or wheeling from home to school. Both concepts have valence in healthcare: there are ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ movements, and there are moral hierarchies of mobilities wherein, for example, independent ambulation is ordered above wheeling (Gibson, 2016). But both concepts can be opened and put to work—to perturbate, instigate, agitate, disorder, disturb—to move thought in other directions, to mobilize for radical change. In a posthuman ‘minor gesture,’ we conjure non-volitional mobilities and resist situating movement in pre-constituted humans (Manning, 2016).
Our aims in the paper are generative and activist. We seek to challenge thinking as usual towards re-envisioning non-normative mobilities as potentials. In doing so we do not ignore or minimize disabled people’s oppression and suffering, or dismiss the importance of political struggles to create enabling worlds. To the contrary, we aim to come at activism in a different way—to use the power of art, stories and theory to move discourse in new and fruitful directions through acts of epistemic activism (Rice and Mündel, 2018). Through positioning mobilities as ‘micro-activist’ (Dokumacı, 2018, 2019), we explore how quotidian interactions in everyday spaces transform sociomaterial worlds and consider the implications for thinking and doing differently in healthcare and beyond. Posthumanism in disability studies works to resist ableist underpinnings of humanism that idealize ‘able’ or ‘neurotypical’ bodies, positioning a standard of putatively normal life (Rice et al., 2021). Goodley and Runswick Cole (2014: 2) have suggested that disability is a space that offers possibilities to ‘trouble, re-shape and re-fashion traditional conceptions of the human. . .while simultaneously asserting disabled people’s humanity. . . .’ Along these lines, our approach understands mobility as a more-than-human enterprise while keeping the human[s] in view. We work to mobilize a posthuman ethics of disability and difference that advances ‘alternative ways of conceptualising the human subject’ (Braidotti, 2013: 37) by working to destabilize macro-political enactments of the human (Fox, 2024). Such an approach comes at activism by attending to and conjuring what Erin Manning (2016: 1) refers to as ‘minor gestures,’ creating ‘sites of dissonance (and) staging disturbances that open experience to new modes of expression.’
Mobilizing posthumanism
Posthumanism challenges conventional understandings of humans as self-contained, closed and autonomous subjects to consider the radical openness of people and bodies. Humans are reconfigured as in a continual state of becoming, neither encased by skin nor defined by static binary categorizations such as disabled/abled, male/female, or even person/thing (Massumi, 1992). Assemblage is Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) characterization of the constantly shifting connections or flows between heterogeneous entities, including but not limited to bodies, places, social discourses, emotions and material objects. Assemblage is understood as process rather than thing. In this way, posthumanism is always already concerned with movement, eschewing an ontology of what things ‘are’ to consider how they are produced and productive. Assemblages can be thought of as dynamic and temporary ‘machines’ that can be ‘plugged in’ to other machines that produce different capacities. They connect and cohere through affect, that is, the ability to affect and be affected which amplifies and compels awareness, movements, thoughts, or expressions (Deleuze, 1978; Shouse, 2005). In such an arrangement nothing remains static but in a constant state of movement, of assembling and dis-assembling to enhance or diminish capacities. Humans (and non-humans) are thus not ontologically given or static but an effect of dynamic and kinetic flows of affective encounters. Flows may be smooth and fluid but also cracking, viscous, slow or sudden, bouncing, rough and/or bursting. Braidotti (2013: 100) suggests that posthuman subjectivity is ‘the effect of irrepressible flows of encounters, interactions, affectivity and desire, which one is not in charge of.’ In this posthuman configuration, disability-related and other mobilities exceed narrow notions of purposeful displacements. Movement makes humans, makes worlds and mobilizes creative change.
We take our cue from Kelly et al. (2023: 1–2) to understand movement as ‘encompassing the sensory, perceptual, affective, emotive, communicative, cognitive, physical, psychic, spiritual and all other actual and potential doings of bodies that ripple out into the world to have formative and transformative effects.’ Movement understood as flows of affect works toward becoming. Becoming is affirmative, generative movement that resists being fixed or ‘territorialized’. Through capacities to affect or be affected, assembled bodies effect a change of state or relations which may be physical, biological, psychological, social, political, or emotional in a movement towards re/form (Fox and Alldred, 2017). Bodies thus become in expressing a nonlinearity that nevertheless has directionality, has movement, in the sense that becoming breaks from that which has previously sought to contain it, reconstituting borders (Gibson et al., 2021). This is ‘affirmative’ movement where the term connotes a disruptive change that is open-ended and unpredictable, rather than predetermined as either ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. To this we add that the concept of mobility too can be reconstituted. Mobility assemblages are ‘choreographed’ (Foster, 2011; Kelly et al., 2023) in that spaces, bodies, objects and movements affectively-discursively shape each other without a particular intentionality. Moreover, mobility can be broadly understood in terms of the capacity of research, ideas and theory to choreograph change through epistemic activism and an affirmative posthuman ethics.
We thus aim in this paper to reassemble movements and subjects, not to deny or destroy the human but to conjure non-destructive flows that give rise to joyful or affirmative transformations. As noted, ‘affirmative’ disruptions are those that break from that which has become entrenched but are not necessarily or only ‘positive’ in their formation or experience. Affirmative differences carry potential to disrupt, but the effects are multiple and cannot be known in advance. In the paper we deliberately work to conjure particular (anti-oppressive, joyful, celebratory) affirmative breaks in patterns of thinking and doing, while not losing sight of the pain and suffering manifested in the lives of disabled people. To do so, we map shifting disability/mobility assemblages to explore how young people in the study experienced movements and flows, and use this knowledge to re-theorize mobility and disability.
In what follows, we ask how non-normative mobilities spur creative potentials within ableist constraints, where ‘misfittings’ (including those manifested through shaming and dehumanization), work to disrupt the order of things (Ahmed, 2019; Garland-Thomson, 2014; Rice, et al., 2021). We explore: What opportunities and constraints provide creative possibilities wherein movement resists conventions to produce something unexpected, unique, helpful, positive and/or emotive? How do these flows provide new ways of understanding different /unconventional bodies, encourage experimentation, inspire creative ways of doing? And how can disability mobilities be theorized and researched to strengthen inquiry and re/form health and social care?
Study details: The youth mobility project
For the study, we used an exploratory participatory design and multiple methods. The research team included five youth partners (ages 16–27 years) who identified as disabled. The study took place in a Canadian city during the Covid19 pandemic. Over the course of 3 weeks, youth partners used a secure interactive app (ethOS™) to independently create and post images, videos and stories of how they moved through their worlds in their everyday activities. During this process, youth communicated with a research assistant via the app. These dialogues included discussions about their posts and co-generated ideas regarding what else might be shared. Discussions about the posts, mobility and disability continued during subsequent research activities. Each youth partner also participated in an individual dialogue (one-to-one interview) and a group dialogue workshop with the other partners to further explore and share how mobilities were produced and experienced. All dialogues were open-ended conversations that began with discussions about partners’ posts. For example, we discussed the process of choosing what to post and if/how it generated new thoughts or insights into their and others’ mobilities; their lives, histories and experiences; and/or their thoughts on disability more broadly. Engagement in the various activities and dialogues occurred over the course of 14 months wherein partners created/shared and discussed 48 photos, 32 videos and various other poems, academic writings/performances and internet postings. Research ethics approval was obtained in March 2021 from the University of Toronto Health Sciences Research Ethics Board.
Posthuman inquiry is produced in relation to a ‘research assemblage’ that includes the contexts of the research (e.g., the academy), its aims, the material mediators and constraints placed on inquiry, and the people engaged in the research who come with their own histories, knowledges and subject positions (Fox and Alldred, 2015). Each of these entities can and do shift in the doing of a project. Our academic team members included six researchers who claimed diverse spaces of belonging in terms of race, sexuality, disability and more and intersecting roles including artist, activist, professor, student, clinician and ally. All of us live in close relation with disability, either identifying as disabled and/or dwelling in and contributing to disability community and culture. Study youth partners included those who identified as LGBTQ+, as racialized and as nonbinary. Four of the five were wheelchair users and all had a range of impairments and medical diagnoses. We share these details to acknowledge that subject positions, identities and social locations are material to the analysis, but we also recognize that these are unstable and partial descriptions and do not begin to capture all the sociomaterial forces, objects, places, positionalities and inclinations that choreographed the study. Moreover, part of our collective work of analysis was to maintain a reflexive stance in considering and reworking the intersections and boundaries of these and other categorizations (Braidotti, 2013; Fox and Alldred, 2017).
Posthuman research as choreography
Posthuman research is generative, drawing on concepts to rewrite the familiar and ‘deterritorialize’ that which has become fixed. We approached our research as choreography, where choreography is understood as a co-mingling of ideas, people and things in/across certain time-spaces (Foster 2011; Kelly et al., 2023). Choreographies generate, translate and transmit knowledge; they enact something new through a coming together that does not assume or rely on the intentions of human choreographers. The Youth Mobility Project research unfolded as a choreography through which ideas, people and things coalesced in particular ways. Across the project, multiple decisions, circumstances and other human and non-human forces were brought to bear on what data were produced and interpreted in what ways, shaping what was attended to or not in our collective workings as researchers and partners. All those involved made particular agential cuts in the data (i.e., drew boundaries, foregrounded some ideas and not others), flowing into openings to enact certain potentials and not others, propagating rhizomatic shoots of analysis, fostering new connections and new insights (Springgay and Truman, 2018). Said differently, choreography ‘cleaves an occasion, activating its relational potential’ (Manning, 2016: 126) wherein analysis moves in response to openings and affordances. Affordances (and the analysis emerging from them) ‘resid(e) neither in the environment nor in the body but in the inherent coupling of the two’ (Dokumaci, 2020: S99). Accordingly, research decisions were not intentional in the standard sense, but emergent tendencies that collided, vibrated and coalesced to move thought in new directions.
The formalized analyses conducted by the academic researcher team were thus only part of the assemblage of knowledge-producing events embedded in the study. Consistent with other forms of immanent research (Manning, 2016), our choreographic analysis emerged from thinking-making-doing that was not procedural or extractive but proliferated from ‘a speculative middle, as propositions, minor gestures and in movement’ (Springgay and Truman, 2018: 211). In keeping with these ideas, we have not set out to present a ‘valid interpretation’ of ‘findings,’ but to rigorously explore relational potentials of the data as part of a knowledge-producing assemblage (Pratt and Rosiek, 2023).
Applying concepts of choreography to our posthuman design fostered our mapping of the ways that different affective forces, objects and places (including acts of analysis and writing) interacted to produce mobility assemblages, and how they morphed to produce new assemblages, trans/form environments, challenge conventions and enact becomings. Part of this work involved posthuman considerations of the concepts of movement, mobility and disability and how to bring theory and data together to re-move and re-fuse each. ‘Mapping’ here does not refer to a physical map but rather the generation of new ideas through examining the specific relations of assembled flows (Fox and Alldred, 2017). As noted, mapping/analysis was an ongoing process of co-creation, thus the shared production of visual-verbal narratives by researchers and youth partners was already a generative act of mapping relations as they formed and reformed. In addition, researchers reviewed data individually to generate ideas and then came together in a series of meetings to share, expand and recompose ideas. Data movement-moments were approached as ‘choreographic objects’ (Manning, 2013: 92) that acted as propositions or points of inflection immanent to the research assemblage and catalysing the experimental thinking-making-doings of mapping. Choreographic objects acted as entry points to activate and propel experimentations ‘by bringing together the pastness of experience (the object as we know it) and its futurity (the object ecology of its novel unfolding)’ (Manning, 2013: 95). Analysis thus dynamically strayed and wandered, crafting a milieu for thinking otherwise.
Integrated into the analyses, we ‘explored destabilizations’ which entailed attuning to those choreographic objects, processes and affordances that serve to foster or constrain mobility possibilities, exploring how mobilities challenged these conditions and opening opportunities for further re-form (Feely, 2020). In doing so, our analyses bounced, crackled, wandered and coalesced to reshape, rethink and move disability/ mobilities. In Deleuzian language, we explored how mobility was ‘territorialized’ through lines of articulation (channels that constrain, direct and striate space) as well as moments of deterritorialization and lines of flight (instances of differentiation and escape) (Feely, 2020; Wilson, 2021). Our approach included actively using these insights to challenge deficit-based thinking. Developing analyses were discussed in the group dialogue with youth partners to further attune the thinking-making-doing of inquiry and to build visual narratives that informed development of a short film about the study (https://revisioncentre.ca/projects/difference-and-movement).
Mobility experiments
In what follows, we present three posthuman ‘mobility experiments’ drawn from the study wherein we work towards enacting two interrelated analytical events: retheorizing disability through movement and retheorizing movement through disability. Each experiment can be understood in terms of becomings, that is, how acts of assemblage can propagate affirmative change that have real world implications for disabled people; and for rethinking disability and difference in the sociomaterial contexts in which they circulate including health and social care. All names are pseudonyms.
Mobility experiment: Energy
The opening of the assembled body toward transformative becoming was replete in our data in all the ways that movement moved, flowed and effectuated change. Miles, who was completing a degree in theatre studies, discussed their work as an actor and a dancer in terms of a ‘moveable island’ with the wheelchair as a ‘repository of energy’:
My wheelchair actually works to an advantage because it provides more sensation that I can bounce off of to be in touch with my body from a physical standpoint. Living with a disability and being a power wheelchair-user feels like you’re accessing the world from a ~ I often think about how
The moveable island is dynamic assemblage, coming into relation with replaceable parts/other assemblages that compose souls, enact becomings. Miles describes how energy is stored and released (through sensation, bouncing, touch) expanding his assembled capacities while also producing a ‘tethering’. For better or for worse, some configurations suffer more than others and territorializations resist escape. Nevertheless, the world is reshaped in doing. Ableist materialities constrain as well as re-assemble, producing ‘misfittings’ that can unleash capacities (Miles: ‘my wheelchair actually works to an advantage’). Indeed, for all the blockages created by inaccessible worlds, misfitting can redirect the assembled body’s energies towards creativity. As Garland Thompson (2014: 604) notes: ‘Acquiring or being born with the traits we call disabilities fosters an adaptability and resourcefulness that often is underdeveloped in those whose bodies fit smoothly into the prevailing, sustaining environment.’
In releasing stored energy something new is created that tears at borders. Intensities flow across, through and over the assembled body releasing desire, reconfiguring through doing, re-moving. Miles and others spoke of how this choreographic coming together of bodies, technology and misfit creativity generated new communities and opportunities for expression, love, sex, work and care. Prosthetic bodies (Shildrick, 2022) come into relation with forces, lines of articulation (Miles: ‘what society isn’t built for’), which limit potential AND spur innovation, the impetus to assemble and effect difference. Lines of articulation rhizomatically propagate and break into new patterns when encountering affect, forming lines of flight, creatively pushing at limits in micro-activist gestures of reform.
Enwheeled bodies (Papadimitriou, 2008) are choreographed in specific arrangements when they encounter ableist lines of articulation. These events might produce multiple and varied moments of resistance that re-world disability. The following is an excerpt from a poem entitled ‘Beyond The Wheelchair’ shared by Allison:
This wheelchair doesn’t define me |This wheelchair says nothing about me | You see this is the problem, so many people see my chair before they see me |They see the thing that gets me around and assume my brain doesn’t work so they talk to whoever is with me |No| I am a human being! |I can talk for myself! |Yes, I have a physical disability |But it’s not who I am| I am (Allison) |I am funny, sarcastic, smart and sometimes too smart |People think because I’m in this wheelchair that I’m special |They want a high five even though they barely know me | You think it’s cool that I’m living my life despite my disability? |No! |
Allison’s appeals to be seen as ‘unique’ and as ‘just another human’ produce lines of flight towards differences-as-sameness, or said differently, becoming human through resisting closure and mastery. While the ideas in the poem differ significantly from those shared by Miles, both can be read in terms of re-worlding disability. We read both as enfoldings: moving away and back at once. Difference is configured not as other but a claim to ‘difference as non-difference’ or more specifically, as the irreducible differences connecting all humans (Shildrick, 2000). In so doing, Allison affirms that ‘just another human’ can be understood as: all body-subjects are always and necessarily unique, yet also have uneven experiences in their encounters with normative structures and cultures. We plug into this idea by also considering that embodied subjectivities are not stable but transforming and transformative (becoming) as they move through life-living.
In the poem, Allison positions the wheelchair as a symbol of disability that subtracts from normative personhood. The enwheeled body is acknowledged but imbued with a negative valence because of what it encounters and produces: stigma and misunderstanding. These are imposed through discourses and materialities of ableism that are manifested in symbolic and affective relations of the wheelchair, and experienced by Allison as a bordering, that is a subtraction-from-normative existence. The poem resists through affirmative and affective claims of humanity and sameness. During her interview Allison stated: ‘That’s the point of that poem—I am a human like you.’ The poem constitutes a form of resistance, a refusal of typicality as counterpoint by affirming difference-in-itself. Technologies are activated and active through multiple compositions with disability and bodies. Wheelchairs mobilize in all kinds of ways as they come into relation with other machinic assemblages of human and nonhuman bodies and affects, enacting and reacting in multiple and contradictory flows that disperse across time-spaces, producing some capacities and blocking others.
Retheorizing wheelchair mobilities in terms of energies and potentials generates different questions. What capacities are produced through material-semiotic-affective confluences? What enables or blocks flows towards affirmative becoming? What connections choreograph capacities to do, think, create, love, live? Wheeled mobility can be understood as micro-activist resistance within emplaced events. Appeals to be seen as human, as repositories of energy, are minoritarian acts of transformation, doing ordinary things in extraordinary (unconventional/creative) ways. Taking on new and variable movement forms shifts disability’s placing in the world and in so doing, reborders what counts as ‘normal/ human’. Potentials abound.
Mobility experiment: Active passivities
With these ideas in mind, we turn to our second experiment in which we theorize mobilities contra notions of so called ‘active’ and ‘passive’ activities to locate movement in stillness. In this, territorialized ‘passive activities’ become ‘active passivities’ wherein the contemporary moral imperative to ‘stay active’ is opened for scrutiny through celebrating different ways that movement moves. To do so we consider some of Jack’s mobilities.
Jack: I don’t go outside much because I prefer being inside. I like to make music on my computer and play video games. (text post)
In (seeming) contrast to this comment, almost all the posts that Jack shared for the study reflected activities outside his family home. Similarly, when we asked him to share a ‘typical day’ he posted photos and videos related to a one-time family outing to an amusement park. This suggested to us that Jack had understood the kind of content we sought for the study in a particular way, i.e., in terms of doing something ‘active’ or dynamic that involved physical movement, in different places and perhaps with others. This is understandable given how the study was presented as focused on mobilities and perhaps more so considering the normative characterizations of activities as ‘active’ or ‘passive’ that pervade health care and the social imaginary (e.g., ‘sitting is the new smoking,’ active lifestyles, the presumed perils of screen time) (Palmer et al., 2021). No doubt Jack had encountered these ideas in school, rehabilitation and elsewhere. ‘Choices’ regarding what to share and/or attend to (by Jack, researchers and readers of this paper) are produced through collisions of sociomaterial forces that inform ‘rational’ calculations. Jack assembled a subject that worked to satisfy what the research and perhaps society, seemed to be demanding: Active-Jack.
In contemplating Jack’s posts, we consider how so-called ‘passive’ activities and stillness might be reorganized and theorized as lively affirmations. Jack’s indoor screen time, including making music or playing video games, typically indexed as ‘passive’ activities, can be reconceptualized as ‘active’ or affirmative active passivities. Creating, making and doing are kinetic excitations. There is movement in everything. Not only displacements (but those too) but also virtual movement potentials that transpose thought and action in particular lines. Rebordering active/passive distinctions lets go of a focus on isolated human bodies moving through space to conjure a multiplicity of movement flows that assemble and choreograph bodies (human and otherwise). Manning (2009) retheorizes movement as an affective force and flow that is also present in apparent stillness (‘preacceleration’) through which bodies are formed and reformed across encounters. She states, ‘that a body moves without displacing itself means that rest becomes an instance of absolute movement. Rest becomes an activity of rhythm’ (Manning, 2009: 16). Along these lines, we suggest there can be no passive/active distinction and more profoundly, no stable movement/stillness distinction. The notion of ‘active passivities’ reclaims movement and stillness as affective happenings that enact bodies differentially in plastic configurations as processes ‘of individuation where matter and form remain in flux’ (Manning, 2009: 18). Actively-passive-Jack.
Staying with Jack, we extend this analysis to decentre the human and consider ‘sitability’ (Manning, 2009) as a rhizomatic departure/return to our first experiment regarding wheelchair mobilities. In this, active passivities are produced through affective encounters with different types of chairs. Jack, who was a wheelchair user, shared photos and videos where he and his brothers rode a roller coaster. In contemplating how movement moves, we cast the roller coaster as another expression of seated mobility that choreographs human and non-human bodies. Consider these two different chairs. The chair with wheels (wheel-chair), is usually seen as a mobility chair but it does other things. It is also something people sit in, like other chairs. Wheeling is both a position of rest and a position of dynamic activity where the lines between rest and activity, passive and active, become blurred and are no longer helpful. Bodies sit when tired of standing and ‘do’ rest. Sitting has ‘uses,’ a particular for-ness (Ahmed, 2019) and different chairs are designed to address predetermined uses—a gaming chair facilitates video game playing, an office chair is adjustable to enable ergonomic work, a rocking chair favours relaxation, etc. But chairs may not be used for the purposes they were designed. They also serve as stools, ladders and dog beds for example, or even weapons. Chairs assemble and reassemble in different combinations, choreographing different events and capacities.
The roller coaster seat is implicated in active passivities. For Jack, it effects a break in the wheelchair assemblage enabling other capacities and events. The body reassembles, that is, recomposes in taking on a new relation to a new chair (wherein the chair also recomposes). The roller coaster chair is designed for fun and safety, for safe fun. Multiple bodies sit in it over the course of a day/year. One size fits all! (which of course it doesn’t—as a universal chair it does not ‘accommodate’ all morphologies). The seat is secured to the roller coaster and a body secured to the seat (by other bodies). Safe and connected—to the seat, to the roller coaster, to the family members and strangers taking the same brief ride. Movement has already occurred (pre -acceleration) in the stillness beforehand that is filled with sensation, emotion and possibility, the anticipation of pleasurable fear and pure speed. It begins! Bodies together take on the velocity of the coaster. This is another moving chair but not coded as ‘mobility device’ like a wheelchair. It is not about physical displacement, even though displacement occurs. Getting to another location is not the point, there is no other ‘there’ to go to, only a re-turn. It plays another game: movement for movement’s sake, for pleasure’s sake. Actively passive bodies are trans-formed becoming speed, fun, fear, adrenaline.
So what? The reassembling of chairs extends to other modalities, other movements of thought that leak into actualizations of movement events. Mobility is reconceptualized as a creative force of becoming rather than a volitional activity of getting from here to there. Instead of pregiven chairs, bodies and persons, each strives to that which it is not yet, taking form through affects that compel recomposing. This body-person-chair, ‘Jack’ in this time-space, is alive with potential movement and possibilities for reconfiguration. Recomposing chairs, stillness and activity as active passivities celebrates differences as potentials wherein the movement experiments that we (youth partners, researchers, readers) co-create serve to challenge ableist practices that engender standards for acceptable forms of activity. Demonized indoor ‘screen time’ choreographs another mode of creative movement expression wherein objects, ideas, bodies, sounds, motions, places are enlivened to produce joyful doings. In these doings, Jack assembles a micro-activist resistance to the imperatives of what constitutes right and proper activity. We take this cue to re-theorize mobility as sitting, as stillness, as pleasure. Chair assemblages effect an escape towards affirmation of disability and difference as potential ‘to generate culture, liberation and change, and give greater access to life’ (Kelly et al., 2023: 6). Jack becomes through stillness and speed.
Mobility experiment: Conveyance
In this final experiment we consider communication as a conveyance machine. All bodies convey and in so doing come into relation with other forces and entities to communicate something in the world. This too is movement. Conveyances actualize something in the world and, in this, communication is a form of energy exchange where bodies are changed in the doing. Humanist notions of communication focus on imparting information to or by humans. We suggest communication is prosthetic, that is, a productive capacity, an ability to affect and be affected, through composing communication assemblages that come into congress with others. It may or may not involve sounds and/or bodily gestures (dance conveys as well as music), but all communication involves a machine assembling itself and plugging into an/other(s). In music where movement metaphors abound, Wilson (2017: 17–18) has noted that ‘music and musical practices both extend bodies and permeate them. This is most readily apparent in the boundaries between musical instruments and instrumentalists that are complicated through acts of performance: the instrumentalists’ gestures become, through the instrument, expressive output; in a feed-back relation the instrumentalist also responds to the sound produced–and to the sum sonic total fashioned by all the instrumentalists in their ensemble–such as to modify their bodily gestures and hence the sonic outcome once again.’ The sonic outcome Wilson describes is not one thing but is differentially shaped by perception of each listener who, for example, might hear/feel a tune, a beat and/or a rhythm in various measures. Communication permeates bodies and in so doing conveys affects and affects conveyances.
We extend this theoretical line of flight to consider the modes of expression generated by our youth partner, Neil and his assistant Linda. Neil communicated through a variety of methods including verbalizations, two electronic communication devices and/or communication partners. The latter included family members and Linda. Importantly we position all communication as produced through prosthetic connections between, for example, bodies, objects, sounds, gestures, interpretive schemas and/or the logics of language. So, while our focus is disability, our analysis is not contained by/to it. Wilson (2017) reminds us of the multi-directionality of communication; it is reciprocal but also generative, feed-back also feeds-forward. In our interview with Neil and Linda, the instruments of communication assembled in specific arrangements to convey: Neil/Linda/device/interviewer/Zoom/chairs/study/emotions/rooms/ ideas etc. This particular conveyance functioned as a coherent but temporary whole with a limited array of replaceable human and non-human parts.
Neil and Linda met with a research assistant for a virtual interview via Zoom. In the video recording of the interview, Neil can be seen seated in his wheelchair. His head is often moving—rotating, flexing and extending—and these movements increase when he speaks. The rest of his body is not visible on camera, but one can see his whole body moving suddenly forward and back at times, especially when he is particularly animated. These movements suggest that speaking is effortful, but also remind us that communication is a whole-body affair for all bodies. The research assistant, who was also an occupational therapist, wrote the following in her post-interview notes:
Neil has cerebral palsy and severe dystonia which cause him to have involuntary movements and postures which significantly affect his gross motor, fine motor, and oral motor coordination. He uses a power wheelchair and requires a full-time personal support worker with him to assist with activities of daily living. Neil does attempt verbalizations but has difficulty with functional speech.
We draw on this note to further consider how impairment, disability and subjects are produced through interpretive cuts. The research assistant draws on her familiarity with clinical logics and terminology to convey to the research team something about Neil. Its descriptive and use-full for the clinicians on the team, while also jarring in its use of medical jargon. Something is conveyed: we picture a young man whose body is unruly, whose speech may be difficult to understand. But in picturing Neil, we also reflect that what gets produced in biomedicine which is centred around lack and differences that are marked in a negative register. ‘Involuntary movements,’ ‘difficulties,’ ‘requires help,’ ‘severe dystonia’ all suggest difference as deficit, captured as a medicalized problem. But other cuts, other ‘Neils,’ are possible that do not position his movements as lack or problem but as forms of conveyance that have equal moral standing with so-called ‘functional speech’.
From the interview transcript:
Neil I just want to clarify, do you use—do you type an answer? Or do you use an eye-gaze type of system on your computer? What do you use?
No, I use typing and [unclear verbal response]
Neil tries with his words. We have a Proloquo2Go [a communication app] as well. He can pick his words, and he has his eye gaze, but his eye gaze isn’t up right now. We have his iPad and his [app]. . .but I’m also here to help decipher if you don’t understand what he is saying.
We consider Linda’s comment about ‘deciphering’ as extending beyond the act of restating words. Neil as communicator is inscribed as a code, a cipher, that is, a conglomeration of non-normative symbols, cues, utterances and movements that come together to convey something. Linda reads the codes as an intricate part of an assembled conveyance machine. ‘Neil’s’ body, through sounds and movements, comes into relation with ‘Linda(’s)’ who de-ciphers. This is an interpretative act that comingles with her own understandings and capacities for functioning within a world designed for particular normative conveyances. Together they produce ciphers and decipherers. The communication app also de-ciphers. It transforms body talk into electro-talk. ‘Voice’ is always a conglomeration of physical mechanics—air, muscle, glottis, lips, tongue—semiotics (language), positionings (class, gender, race) and agentic expression (perspectives, claims). Proloquo2Go is another object-force in the assemblage of voice conveyances—verbalization, writing (pen, computer), audio recordings. These affective forces are biological, electronic, mechanical and discursive. They are also emotional both in what drives the machine and what is produced—sweat, joy, battery depletion, wear and tear/s. And they are emplaced—pandemic, Zoom, wheelchair, home, research study. All mediate, choreograph, compose, co-produce. De-cipher and re-cipher to convey, to move.
Configuring communication as conveyance, as movement, has implications for how disability is understood and enacted in the world. For example, Neil-Linda-research assistant’s communication did not conform to typical interview temporalities or ‘one-to-one’ conventions of research interviewing methods. Bodies, technologies, information and temporal expectations interacted in specified ways to enact communication. How ‘doing communication’ and ‘doing research’ were choreographed was not predetermined but involved creative processes and adjustments. This too is activist, a minor gesture that disrupts normativities and assembles new modes of expression (Manning, 2016). As in all the experiments we have outlined above, retheorizing disability as potential opens opportunities for the proliferation of difference, expanding notions of political change and resistance. Such re/forming is conjured through pervasive minor gestures and micro-activist conveyances.
Departure: Differences as potentials
We have drawn on a posthuman onto-epistemology to experiment and in so doing, to reborder humans and other souls. Choreographies of disability mobility provide an impetus for reimagining what is indexed as problem or deficit. This is resistance in claiming difference, in theorizing in the affirmative, in demonstrating the cracks in everything. The dynamism of posthuman assemblages provide a catalyst to rethink movement as an affective force not limited to physical displacement. Our experiments explored movement as/in/of energy, stillness, conveyance—asking how movement moves. Our aim was to produce problems rather than solve them, or more accurately, to mobilize new ways of thinking that both produce and notice minor gestures and what they achieve in the doing (Manning, 2016). Micro-activism expresses everyday actions that create new modes of existence, the molecular conveyances that shift relations to reborder worlds. As Manning notes (2016: 24): ‘(T)he minor gesture can open the way for a different kind of knowing, a knowing in the event, in nonlinear event-time, a knowing that, while impossible to parse, delights in the force of conceptual invention.’ In experimenting with disability mobilities, we sought to demonstrate affirmative becoming through tinkering with bodily modes of expression to enact something new through movement. With integrated/connected/ moving bodies, subjectivities can be made and unmade through various connections, rhythms and velocities. Choreography materializes particular subjects in congress with other forces, materials and timings, making available new affirmative modes of becoming.
Disability in these gestures is understood as a bordered category that can be opened and reconfigured in the affirmative. Our posthuman analysis is political but not in the structuralist sense. Rather we think of micro-activism in relation to small acts of disobedience. Ahmed (2019: 207) notes that ‘(a) failure to use something properly can be a refusal to use something properly.’ In this she explores how the forces that thwart doing-as-usual create a misfit that ‘can be generative rather than necessarily catastrophic’ (Ahmed, 2019: 224). Disability emerges as a kinetic site of potential, a line of flight which functions to vandalize lines of articulation, exposing the limits of a system and forging new potentials: disobedience as dis-order, as potential, as world building. Posthuman experimentation works to find new uses that are perhaps useless in the current order but useful for creating new worlds. These worlds open possibilities for disabled and non-disabled alike. Creating new machines for becoming human. Refusing and re-fusing (Gibson, 2006).
Approaching differences as potentials works toward enacting a posthuman disability ethics into health and social care spaces. Epistemic activism through experimentation speaks to those forces, including biomedicine, that seek to homogenize, normalize and suppress difference. These actions are especially problematic when done in the name of care, support and so-called empowerment. Healthcare and other social imperatives see disability as problem and work to efface differences. They work to ensure normal bodies, normal activities, normal movements and normal social roles, producing good capitalist citizens. An affirmative posthuman ethics sees disabled people instead as explorers of the impossible (Kristeva, 1998). Seeing disability as potential manifests an urgency to create and sustain accessible, livable worlds. Braidotti (2013: 100–101) suggests that a posthuman ethics is one that is ‘not bound negatively by shared vulnerability, the guilt of ancestral communal violence, or the melancholia of unpayable ontological debts, but rather by the compassionate acknowledgement of their interdependence with multiple others. . . .’ In health and social care contexts, a posthuman disability ethics thus does not focus on identifying lack or assume ‘moralistic versions of humanity’ (Dillard-Wright et al., 2024: 5) but rather attends to fostering relations, creativity and joyful movements in all their forms. As Dillard-Wright et al. (2024: 7) assert, ‘(a)n affirmative ethics approaches care as worldbuilding, a sort of ethics in action. Rather (than) rules-bound, algorithmic, individualistic and harm-avoidant, this kind of approach instead prioritizes relation, affirming the value and dignity of human and more-than-human life, contributing to the well-being and flourishing of individuals and society as a whole.’
The risk in posthuman experimentation is a minimization of the pain and suffering of minoritized people. We noted in the introduction that an aim of the paper was to shift deficit thinking and ‘damage-centred’ scholarship that centres on the hardships experienced by persons with ascribed differences (Goodley and Runswick-Cole, 2014; Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2010; Titchkosky, 2009). To do so, we have endeavoured to locate the joyful, productive and enabling potentials of difference while acknowledging oppression and the suffering it produces. We approach this work with deep humility and trepidation, knowing that we may inadvertently be contributing to harms that we are hoping to address. Choreographing the field of affects that act on/to/with bodies inevitably attunes to some forces and not others. Specifically, our analyses say little about the entangled lines of articulation that materialize minoritized differences along lines of, e.g., race, gender, sexuality and coloniality. Moreover, Puar (2017) reminds us that the material conditions for positive re-envisionings of disability are not readily available to all. Our intent is not to obscure these formations and the suffering they evoke. We approach these cautions by inviting critique and further scholarship that disrupts differences along other lines.
We close with an opening: we position this research as movement, a choreographic coming-together of human and non-human entities, ideas, forces, places, things that has a direction but not an endpoint. We interrogated limits and possibilities, asking how movement moves in ways that reborder disability, how disability moves as a creative force of production. We asked what happens in the interludes, the rhythms, beats and refrains of disability that move affirmatively. Part of what research does is notice the minor gestures that are already activist in their doing. To this end, we finish with a written passage shared by Naomi:
Today, now, in this moment, I can confidently say as a young disabled, woman of colour, I desire the ugliness for the ways it ‘dismantles’ and ‘disrupts’ what it means to be beautiful. I desire this ugliness for the ways it contains a magnificence that breaks down the wall that once stood in the way of my disabled body’s freedom. . . I respect my disabled body in all its magnificence for the ways it gives me strength and power and for how it pushes me to flourish and thrive. It gives me the liberty to give myself titles of lifesaver, survivor, mermaid and butterfly.
Differences map new pathways, enabling capacities and choreographing lines of flight for re/worlding. Our partners elegantly conveyed the embodied, connected, affective experience that enables this becoming. Modes of movement-as-recomposing as we saw in each of the experiments and this passage. Becoming in these articulations is not only for disabled people, but rather the affective connectivities of disability signal ways to disrupt, flourish and thrive.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank our youth partners who gave so generously of their time and insights.
Data availability
Data for this study is not available in order to maintain the anonymity of the five youth partner participants. Data includes identifiable details in visual, auditory and written form that cannot be de-identified without significant redaction, compromising anonymity and/or narrative integrity.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This paper draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Ethical approval and informed consent
The study was approved by the Health Sciences Research Ethics Board of the University of Toronto on Mar 4, 2021, protocol #40403. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants.
