Autoethnography, Arts-Based Inquiry, and Disability Justice: Critical Reflections on Embodied Knowledge
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15273/hpj.v6i2.12737Keywords:
arts-based approaches, disability justice, climate change, embodied health, poetryAbstract
Dominant approaches to health research often privilege Western, positivist paradigms that abstract health from lived experience and reinforce individualistic, ableist, and binary understandings of disability. Arts-based autoethnographic approaches offer alternative ways of knowing that foreground relational and embodied dimensions of illness and health. This paper reflects on the use of arts-based autoethnography as a disability justice-oriented approach to knowledge production, drawing on examples from the author’s climate change research to illustrate how disability is experienced and negotiated in everyday life. It explores how narrative and artistic practices can expand understandings of health and embodiment, while situating climate precarity among several intersecting contexts. Poetry is employed to situate disability knowledge within broader social, political, and environmental contexts, treating arts-based autoethnography not as illustration but as a method of knowing. This paper demonstrates how disability justice can be achieved through expressions of lived experience, with climate change and societal conditions functioning as illustrative sites where unequal exposure to risk, care, and resources become visible. Artistic practices make legible forms of disability wisdom often marginalized within conventional health research, while challenging individualized and depoliticized framings of health. This reflection argues that arts-based autoethnography aligns closely with disability justice by resisting historically dominant research paradigms, expanding what counts as health knowledge, and centering marginalized ways of knowing. As both method and political stance, arts-based autoethnography offers generative approaches to health research that respond to social, environmental, and embodied realities without reducing them to singular or universal narratives.
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