Crip Empathography: Co-creating a Graphic Novel about Parkinson’s Dance Experiences

Maria Bee Christensen-Strynø*, Lisbeth Frølunde, Louise Jane Phillips

*Corresponding author

Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskriftTidsskriftartikelForskningpeer review

Abstract

The article combines the concept of empathography with aspects of crip methodology and theoretical reflections on the gaze in critical disability studies and, in doing so, creates a strategy for analyzing processes of co-producing a graphic novel about Parkinson’s dance. The production of the graphic novel Moving Along: a Co-Produced Graphic Novel About Parkinson’s Dance was part of a collaborative research project about dance for people with Parkinson’s disease and their relatives. The analysis is based on examples of the participatory, iterative processes of writing and drawing along with texts and images from the final graphic novel through two thematic figurations as analytic fix points, the kaleidoscope and the tree of life. By highlighting embedded spectator positions and multiple ways of looking, gazing, and staring, the analysis stirs up concerns about storytelling, empathy, and disability as a continuum of embodied difference in ways that question traditional binaries of disability/ability and illness/health(iness) related to living with Parkinson’s. On this basis, the argument is that the poetic and aesthetic processing of personal experiences of chronic illness and disability in relation to Parkinson’s dance holds a valuable critical potential as a form of crip empathography.
OriginalsprogEngelsk
TidsskriftJournal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies
Vol/bind17
Udgave nummer3
Sider (fra-til)327–348
Antal sider22
ISSN1757-6458
DOI
StatusUdgivet - 9 aug. 2023

Emneord

  • disability studies
  • chronic illness and disability
  • Parkinson’s dance
  • Relational ethics
  • aesthetic and poetic experiences
  • embodied knowing
  • graphic medicine
  • arts-based research
  • Parkinson's disease

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