What does a person with a mild intellectual disability become when we ask them not to be a co-researcher, but what they truly wish to pursue? What will it teach us about being in the world without being able to read or write, or about when language falters—as happens for people experiencing dementia or long-term mental illness? We study art as a means to support well-being and care, particularly in situations that do not lend themselves to cure.

We embrace this humanist approach as scholars interested in the ethics of chronic care for people with cognitive disabilities. Our interest in ethics is empirical, based on ethnographic research on the diversity of what people actually do in the world. Eschewing the measurement of interventions, we treat ethnographic analysis as a matter of understanding the moral and aesthetic values that shape care relations, involving anthropological research in philosophical questions about what goodness looks like. In line with our approach to cognitive disability, chronic care and evaluative ethics, we do not seek to pronounce scientifically on the lives of others or to pressure them to conform to existing norms, but to engage and support them in all their particularity.

Affiliated researchers