'I am Pleased to Share my Thoughts and Opinions'- Including Marginalised People with Disabilities in Inclusive Qualitative Research in Bangladesh Through Creative, Relational Methodologies.

Shaw, Jackie; Wickenden, Mary

The rhetoric of 'nothing about us without us', motivates much disability inclusive research, but meaningful participation of the most marginalised is still rare. There is a tendency to recruit only people with disabilities who are perceived as 'easier to include'. We reflect critically on recent fieldwork in Bangladesh working with local and international NGOs on a disability inclusive employment project. We focus on inclusion of the most marginalised people with disabilities: those with complex communication, psychosocial, intellectual or multiple impairments, or those who face intersecting inequalities. During a two-stage process, we engaged with 4 small groups of people in 2 sites. The participants were involved in an adapted vocational training programme, and had either both visual and hearing impairments, or were economically disadvantaged young disabled women. We discuss how creative, inclusive, participatory methodologies were combined to explore participants' experiences of pathways to work through learning a trade. We consider the ethical, methodological rationales for our research epistemologies; including development of local research teams' and participants' awareness, confidence and capacities; and what worked and didn't to enable or constrain inclusion and knowledge generation. We synthesise insights and recommendations about engagement/recruitment, situated ethics, accommodating individual needs, challenging assumptions, building communication capacities and group agency, maintaining inclusive interaction, multi-modal communication, using visual, tactile, narrative and creative methodologies, sequencing and layering methods, generating emotional knowledge, and collective analysis. We discuss the dynamic situated, emotional, interactional, and relational enablers of inclusion, and how participatory methodologies are applicable in research contexts to move beyond working with the 'usual suspects' to effectively engage people who are most often excluded.

BANGLADESH; POOR people; INCLUSION (Disability rights); VISION disorders; PEOPLE with disabilities; YOUNG women

International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2024, p1

1609-4069

Academic Journal

10.1177/16094069241257948