Diss ing Time, Disabling Narrative: Methodological Turnings in Neuroqueered Inquiry

Animated by neuroqueerness as a theoretical and analytical tool for opening up new directions in qualitative inquiry, we attend to the methodological turnings that are provoked when notions of temporality fuse with insights from disability studies. We develop an “assemblage of narration” with Spencer, an autistic and intellectually disabled student, during a series of art-making sessions when we invited disabled middle and high schoolers to express imaginings of school and learning. Plugging in the concept of duration, which is more aligned with lived time, we take up a narrative inquiry with Spencer to arrive at four ways of diss ing time—giggling, dreaming hacking and infecting. Attending to embodied inventions, we learned, can disrupt linear temporality within our co-compositional practices.