Exploring joy as an active actor in reframing experiences of dis/ability

I work with images, stories, objects and employ object-oriented Actor-Network-Theory to co-author research with my clients. This allows us to focus on untraditional but remarkable things like hope, wants and happiness. Together, we have emerged an innovative approach that attempts to match our everyday life and all of its surprises. Disability is frequently explored from oppression and disadvantaged perspective and remains on the edge of methodological and theoretical imagination. Yet my research has found that joy is just one of the actors that have the capacity to reassemble disability and potentially promote affirmative experiences and productive collaborations between disciplines. In this short, animated film, my participants help me show joy as a key actor in their everyday life and offer an alternative appreciation of it for practitioners and policymakers who develop and provide services for disabled people. A video presentation using animation that was presented at the 2021 British Sociological Association, Medical-Sociology Conference.