Agency through leisure in the lives of persons with intellectual disabilities

The article is based on a phenomenological study with 18 persons with intellectual disabilities in the state of Kerala in the south of India. It explores the expression of agency among the participants through the medium of leisure and finds that participants express agency through resistance, adaptation, and meaning making. Mundane activities such as sweeping, preparing food, or braiding a friend’s hair were experienced as leisure, becoming sites of dignity, joy, and selfhood. These findings challenge normative work–leisure binaries and highlight leisure as a vital space of agency, resilience, and belonging for persons with intellectual disabilities in constrained environments. These expressions, though not always explicit, are micro-overtures in the everyday flow of rhythm centred around leisure activities and highlight the active ways in which persons with intellectual disabilities mould the environments they engage with.