Disability as dialogue: Engaging with disability as an embodied way of knowing in Parkinson’s dance research

This chapter takes a view of disability as embodied knowing. This knowing formed the basis for a collaborative research process between dancers with Parkinson’s disease, dance practitioners and university researchers. Drawing on dialogic communication theory and critical disability studies, we develop a dialogic and discursive theorization of embodied knowing by centering on the productive particularities of disabled embodiment in and about Parkinson’s dance as important forms and sites of knowledge production. The analysis focuses on data from dance sessions and discussion panels in a dance and research symposium in which disability is examined and thematized in terms of productive ways of knowing. By displaying critical insights into dialogic enactments and articulations of embodied knowing, the analysis shows how a framing of disability as dialogue enriches our understanding of particular marginalized forms of embodiment in and about dance.