The affordance of sense: Worlding disability in research

This article explores how curriculum can serve our methodological practice as we inquire into inclusive schooling with intellectually/developmentally disabled middle and high school students. Interweaving a theory of activist affordances (Dokumaci, Citation2023) with writings that emphasize the potentiality of transgressive actions via sensory contact, we analyze the curricular affordances of our research space, namely a series of art-making sessions in which 11 students with complex support needs participated during the 2023–2024 school year. Adopting a non-representational approach to the many video-recordings we made of the sessions, we identified a few broad structural movements, namely spaciousness and potentiality in human-object relations, intelligibility within fields of yearning, and a caring sociality for thinking-with. Through these curricular tendencies, we came to understand the potentiality of this space to invite forms of experimentation (for us and our student–participants) when we (re)turn to the sensing body. Collectively, they offer opportunities for exploding the grids of intelligibility on which curricular spaces—whether in schools or within research—are built, thereby worlding disability differently. We argue that by invoking sensation through arts-based approaches, we are invited into modes of knowing and being that exceed the scripts of medicalized discourses in which students with complex support needs are embedded in schools. Eschewing binary notions, the article moves towards understanding inclusion as an embodied fluid assemblage where no entity is immaterial to the emergence of another.