The learning disability art of care – centring actors with learning disabilities to develop novel understandings of care

The health inequalities experienced by people with learning disabilities are perpetuated by stigmatisation and clinicians’ inconsistent disability literacy, both of which are exacerbated by learning-disabled people’s marginalisation in healthcare research where they rarely figure as knowledge producers. This project addresses these interlinked issues by engaging learning-disabled actors in a Participatory Action Research project to generate new understandings of care through the development—and subsequently application in research with medical students—of a novel methodology for investigating care. The expertise of actors with learning disabilities is central to this: as a co-constructed and embodied practice that relies on sensorial presence, spontaneity, improvisation, and indeed playfulness, care—a concept at once elusive and ubiquitous—has many parallels with performing arts. Moreover, as members of inclusive theatre companies, the actors are at the forefront of daily enacting sophisticated care practices to promote the empowerment of people with learning disabilities. Thus, centring the needs, values and expertise of people with learning disabilities to develop a novel embodied methodology to research care, this project builds on transdisciplinary scholarship associated with care aesthetics and emancipatory disability research to—by generating new understandings of care—interrogate dominant models of care and benefit health-related research.