Towards a crip-ethics: Explorations of embodied and embedded digital storytelling

Changfoot, N., Rice, C., Kelly, E., & Stojanovic, L. (2025). Towards a crip-ethics: Explorations of embodied and embedded digital storytelling. Disability Studies Quarterly, 44(3). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v44i3.8256

Abstract

Re•Vision, an assemblage of multimedia story- and arts-based research projects, works creatively and collaboratively to advance social well-being and justice. Drawing from videos made by Canadian healthcare providers in disability-led workshops, we investigate the potential of disability arts to disrupt dominant conceptions of personhood that cast disabled embodiments as inherently vulnerable and dependent against the striving-for-autonomous, invulnerable embodiments of providers, and in so doing, to transform understandings of bodymind difference in healthcare discourses and dynamics. We analyze these videos along three themes: in/vulnerability, compassionate transgressions, and embodied entanglements both fluid and volatile. In exploring ideas of bodymind difference, healthcare providers call into question the normative invulnerable subject that underpins professional standards, revealing its limits in practice, and the importance of their own embodied and embedded experiences as sources of ethical insight. Video themes surface a "crip-ethics" grounded in processual (process-attuned) dimensions of encounters with and across embodied differences. Premised on an affirmative notion of difference, we argue that processual crip-ethics "crips" autonomy by opening to the human-nonhuman relational ensembles that scaffold disabled people's agency toward social justice, and to the non-universalizable that creates new possibilities for health and care in specific instances.