Abstract
This article interrogates the limits and possibilities of interference as methodology and metaphor in video-based research aiming to disrupt ableist understandings of disability that create barriers to health care. We explore the overlapping terrain of diffractive and interference methodologies, teasing apart the metaphorical-material uses and implications of interference for video-makers in our project. Using the digital/multimedia stories created and an interview as research artifacts, we illuminate how interference manifested in disabled makers’ lives, how interference operated through the research apparatus, and how the videos continue to hold agency through their durability in the virtual realm. Drawing on feminist post-philosophies of matter (Barad) and use (Ahmed), we argue that the videos disrupt the gaze that fetishizes disabled bodies, thereby interfering with cultural-clinical processes that abnormalize disability. The research apparatus interfered with makers’ subjectivities yet also brought people together to generate something new—a community that creates culture and contests its positioning as marginal.
Highlights
Constructive interference, disability, digital/multimedia storytelling, diffraction, use Diffraction, a concept from physics, can be illustrated by the rolling, splitting, and repatterning of waves when, for example, water waves hit a breakwater in the sea
According to feminist physicist Karen Barad (2007), diffraction refers to the “bending and spreading of waves that occur when waves encounter an obstruction,” which produce new patterns in the resulting waves (p. 74). Her relational ontology—or view that reality dynamically forms through intra-actions of phenomena in the world—pivots on diffraction because diffraction refers to the repatterning of waves as they pass through a barrier and to the barrier itself
Putting the concept of interference developed by Karen Barad in her physics-informed feminist theory of agential realism into conversation with artifacts generated in our research, we examine what might be lost and gained when we focus on the workings of interference throughout our research—through ableist society in disabled makers’ lives, through the research apparatus itself, and through the on-going agentic effects of the videos created
Summary
Diffraction (from the Latin, to break apart), a concept from physics, can be illustrated by the rolling, splitting, and repatterning of waves when, for example, water waves hit a breakwater in the sea.
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