Something is happening: encountering silence in disability research

Abstract

PurposeOften, researchers view silence as antagonistic to equity-aimed projects. Because verbal, written, and textually agentive communications are presumed to be the most valid qualitative-research data, moments of silence are under-analyzed. Yet, we argue that silence holds meaning as data and that it is a valid, rich form of communication.Design/methodology/approachThrough this reflective analysis of silence, we invite readers to reconceptualize silence in research from a critical disability-research perspective with emphasis on crip willfulness. We introduce silence as an interpretive, agentive and relational gesture.FindingsWe attend to silence as necessary in all research because it helps researchers excavate able-bodied expectations about communication in qualitative-data-collection practices.Originality/valueWe demonstrate that silences in research can be an interpretive, relational, and agentive gesture that can teach us about taken-for-granted assumptions about research practices. Revisiting our research encounters with this framing of silence informed by critical disability studies allows us to question how traditional social science research methods value some modalities of expression over others. Rather than viewing silence in research as moments when nothing happens, we show that silence indicates something happening and is valid data.

Using Communication Assistants in Qualitative Health Research

“…Conveying qualitative research is communication (Dee-Price, 2020), a term defined by Pearson and Nelson (2000) as the process of understanding and sharing meaning. Yet, what counts as human communication in qualitative research appears reduced to what Jones and Cheuk (2020) refer to as verbal, written and textually agentive communications which are presumed to be the most valid qualitative research data. Left unacknowledged are the corridors of communication that people with complex communication access needs (CCAN) rely upon to access services and to participate in research (Dee-Price, 2022).…”