Learning disabled people’s intimate lives: Accounting for Austerity (360G-Wellcome-203691_Z_16_Z)

This proposal seeks funding to host a two-day participatory Research Meeting in which we will use design fiction methods to critically explore and identify the significant impacts of recent austerity policies upon the intimate, sexual and emotional lives of people with learning disabilities. Our aim in the Meeting is to co-produce and design future inquiry: identifying areas of concern; designing research questions; planning impact; and undertaking the necessary planning involved in high quality co-produced disability research alongside people with learning disabilities and their organisations. Specifically, the Meeting will bring together self-advocates (people with learning disabilities) and their organisations, and academics, practitioners and researchers, to share concerns, knowledges, and experiences of the ways in which austerity politics are reshaping intimate citizenship for learning disabled people – that is, their rights to personal, intimate and sexual life and access to family, love, sex, kinship, friendship, and community. We will learn from design fiction, ‘a method of critical design that uses fictional and narrative scenarios to envision, explain and raise questions about possible futures for design and the society’ (Tanenbaum 2015), in order to imagine alternative futures, work through key concepts and ideas in accessible ways, and strategize future innovative inquiry and impact.