Participant Observation and Academic Disablement: A Duoethnographic Exploration of the Experiences of Disabled Scholars

CP impacts every aspect of the research process, from, conceptualization of a project to sending a project off, because you have to ask yourself, “Is this process going to be feasible, is it going to be accessible to me, and can I do it?” My CP shapes the ways that I view research. For example, whenever you’re doing fieldwork, you need to consider, the amount of time, if being in that space is going to be taxing on your body, if you are going to sit in a certain position, if you are going to take vigorous notes for an extended amount of time, and how you are going to navigate the space. So, my CP is always at the top of my mind whenever I’m trying to think through a research idea, or carry out a method, because I’m trying to do it in a way that is easiest on my body, while also being effective.

For me, the conceptualization of a research project always starts with what I am able to physically do. For instance, I mostly conduct interviews because interviews are an accessible method for data collection (Tracy, 2023). With that being said, interviews are accessible to me, the researcher, because the only disability I experience is blindness. I do not experience auditory sensory processing challenges or other disabilities, so interviews are accessible to me because I can speak with participants and read Braille to ask as I conduct the interview. If I could not speak or read Braille, interviews would be inaccessible to me. Interviews are not accessible for all disabled scholars. For instance, if a deaf or hard of hearing participant desires to participate in a research study, they could always type or write out their responses, but then, they are not getting the experience of the rapport researchers and participants often build during interviews. In addition, interviews are not accessible for neurodivergent individuals because they are often structured and not welcoming of different experiences which honors the neurodivergent experience. So, when you use participant observation as your method of inquiry, you also have to be aware of the challenges you may face. That being said, when we were in our graduate seminar, I fully embraced the challenges we might face in conducting ethnographic fieldwork. So, for me, I argue that conceptualization of a research idea means you need to think about and talk through physical limitations you might face. As I said, interviews work for me, but not all disabled scholars. Limitations such as the field of study are always important for me in conceptualizing a research project. Similar to your CP, my blindness affects every aspect of a research project. I am always thinking about the accessibility or inaccessibility of a methodology like ethnographic fieldwork before I commit to seeing a project through. If the field is a space of disablement, it automatically disadvantages me. For me, conducting research means feeling as though I am fully capable of conducting an ethnographic study. To elaborate, for me, capability has to do with not asking for assistance even though I sometimes might need it as a researcher, and it also means being able to independently see a project through. And let me be honest with you and say, the only reason I could complete our study is because you were my eyes. There is no way I would have been able to independently complete an ethnography without you being there with and for me. But, I do think that conducting ethnographic fieldwork, or any research study for that matter, with multiple authors increases the trustworthiness of a research study, as suggested by Sarah Tracy (2010) in her piece about the Eight Big-Tent criteria. I also think that for disabled scholars, it just takes so much longer for us to conduct meaningful research, not because we can’t conduct the research—just the opposite, in fact–, but because time is not necessarily on our side. However, I love what Margaret Price discusses regarding crip time in her book, “Crip Spacetime.” I would say we are on crip time in that we follow our own rules while also being bound by the rules of the graduate seminar and the campus. I would also argue that there are positive benefits of conducting a duoethnography in a space of disablement. For instance, it is always so interesting hearing about different perspectives of other disabled researchers that I don’t experience because of my blindness. In addition, having more than one person at the site of observation makes the research that much more fulfilling, especially when we have the privilege to bounce ideas off of each other. So, despite the challenges, there are rewards and benefits too.

I absolutely love and echo your mention of crip spacetime. Realistically, time in each space looks different for us, and that’s okay. Not only is that okay, but it should also be appreciated. The interesting thing about our experience with participant observation is that we were constantly considering barriers that were not even on others’ radar. Every time we entered the field, we had to strategize about accessibility in ways that nondisabled researchers rarely think about. From the physical layout of the space to the cognitive and sensory demands of the environment, our experience required an extra layer of planning and adaptation. For example, while other researchers could simply walk into the space and begin observing, we had to take additional time to orient ourselves. I had to figure out how to position myself in a way that would minimize strain on my body, while also making sure I could take effective notes. At the same time, I was describing the environment in detail to you, so that you could engage with the space as well. Meanwhile, you were relying heavily on auditory cues, which became overwhelming in a noisy environment. These layered challenges meant that our process of participant observation took significantly longer than anticipated and added difficulty, complexity, and nuance.

Although I certainly was not naïve to think that our experience conducting fieldwork would be a piece of cake, I was not prepared for the methodological challenges we, as disabled scholars, would be up against. For example, a coffee shop does not necessarily consider the accessibility of the space when they designed the layout. Although I was glad to have you there with me describing everything I needed to capture the detail that is expected in qualitative fieldnotes, I acknowledge that the barriers I faced as a result of sensory overload and feeling really overwhelmed by the physical structure of the space made taking detailed, rich fieldnotes nearly impossible. In addition, all of the noise made it impossible to stay focused on picking out parts of dialogue I might want to capture and take note of.

Yet, despite these challenges, I think our experiences also allowed us to see things that others might overlook. The way people moved through the space, the subtle dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, the ways in which accessibility was or wasn’t considered in everyday interactions . . . these became central to our observations, because they directly impacted our ability to be present in the field. In this way, our disabilities didn’t just pose barriers; they also gave us a unique lens through which to analyze the very structures of participant observation itself. Ultimately, our experience highlights why accessibility needs to be an intentional part of research design from the very beginning. Participant observation assumes a level of physical ability that not all researchers have, and without critically examining those assumptions, we risk excluding valuable perspectives from the field. Also, our teamwork highlights the importance of academic collaboration. While some may see it as a detriment that we relied on each other throughout the process, I fully believe that we, together, held each other accountable to our inquiry.

Participant observation is a particularly difficult method for me. We sit, we watch, and we interpret, while ignoring the physical strain on our bodies. Outside of my CP, when I was 13, I had spinal fusion surgery down the entirety of my back. When I was 17, I broke my neck in a car accident. The sheer time and effort that goes into participant observation is taxing and does a number on my body. We were in the field for hours. Which, I did truly enjoy the experience, but I was constantly desperate to find a new position or relieve some pressure on my body. It felt like if we took a break, we could be looked down upon for not taking our project seriously.

Accessibility impacts everything, in terms of the research process, especially with participant observation, you have one author with CP and another who is blind, so, for me personally, not being able to see what’s going on in the space, I have to always rely on you to then help me see what’s going on. I also rely on my hearing and that’s great, until there is way too much noise, which causes me to feel overwhelmed and experience sensory overload. I would say that you can be overstimulated if you rely solely on your hearing and there is so much noise in the space that it is impossible for you to pick up on vignettes of conversation that you might want to capture for informal interviews. All of the noise also causes me to feel disoriented. So, in some ways, you are my eyes, and that’s tough as well, because you’re trying to write all the action that is going on in the field. However, I inherently miss things because of my blindness. That’s not necessarily something I can help, of course, but it is what it is.

And, as you and I exist in a space or in the field, there’s so much commotion around us that we are bound to miss things. We are a very specific case. At all times, I try to capture the necessary visual details of our observations. However, there’s a lot there. My CP impacts the left side of my body. When I type or write for an extended period of time, my left-hand cramps, locking up, leaving me unable to continue until it slowly unlocks. In those moments, I am physically unable to capture the details expected of us. This not only disrupts my ability to take notes in real-time but also forces me to rely on memory, which adds another layer of difficulty to an already demanding process. While I do my best to document everything as thoroughly as possible, these physical limitations inevitably shape the way I engage with participant observation, influencing what details make it into my notes and which ones get lost in the process. Then, in the review process, you are met with “you should have done more.”

and so, we, as a team, are very interesting, because we pick up a lot of each other’s slack, but at the same time, you can only do what your body allows you to do. In my case, my hearing is a little more in tune–because it has to be, so for me personally, it can be really difficult when a space such as a coffee shop is so loud, drowning out most of the action around us. Honestly, forget about doing informal interviews or going to the space on your own, because those things just can’t happen to the same caliber as they can for nondisabled individuals.

Absolutely. Totally agree. I don’t know if I would frame it as picking up each other’s slack, though. Again, I see it as just working as a team and giving each other the support that we deserve!

I love that! So, if you could describe it, what would you say your actual experience with participant observation was like? How did it stack up to your expectations? Because I expected something totally different.

I had no idea that it was going to be as hard on me as it was. I mean as you know, the tables and chairs at the observation site are wooden and hard, so even just sitting in a space and trying to take notes, suddenly your back is cramping up, then my neck and my hips are giving me problems. It perpetuated chronic pain in my own body, making it difficult to exist in the field and focus on the task at hand. The discomfort became a constant distraction, pulling my attention away from the observations I was trying to record. Instead of fully immersing myself in the environment, I found myself constantly shifting, stretching, and trying to manage the physical toll, which ultimately impacted both my endurance and the depth of my engagement in the research process. I felt like I often couldn’t be as “into it” as I would have liked, whether that be in informal interviews or listening closely to interactions. I did what I could, but I feel like I was always left comparing myself to nondisabled standards—and I don’t want or need to do that anymore.

Yeah, and for me, I would say that sensory overload is real, and it is something that really impacted me, as I’m hearing a million different things going on and it is really hard to focus on just one thing. Because I was hearing so many different sounds at once, I could not fully immerse myself in the research process, try as I might. If you are a blind scholar conducting participant observation, I think you are expected to pick out dialogue. However, the place that you are in is so loud and there’s so much action going on that it’s really hard to just focus on one thing at once, because you’re having to focus on multiple things. So, you are not really getting a complete picture of what is going on in that space. As the old saying goes, often times one conversation would go in the ear and out the other. The only way I can put it is that it was disorienting. So, that’s why I relied so heavily on you [during data collection of our ethnography], because you could see what was going on in the field, but I also acknowledge that that was super taxing to you, because it would take away from your own observations. The reality is, participant observation is something that I, a blind scholar, could not do independently. And so, for that reason, it’s inherently an inaccessible method.

Yeah, I think we weren’t necessarily prepared for the challenges that participant observation was going to bring, so you are right in the fact that I am more than happy to provide you with those visual details, but the reality is, sometimes we missed things as we were each trying to overcome structural barriers around us, while trying to support one another. In many ways, our focus was split, not just on the research itself, but on managing the physical and cognitive demands of the environment. It definitely makes me realize how much goes unsaid or unrecognized as we are learning about how to conduct participant observation. And genuinely, I don’t think that anyone is trying to be exclusionary, but I think that many people just don’t consider disabled perspectives.

Right. When we engage in participant observation, it takes us so much longer than it might take others. In our class, the requirement was 15 hours. We ended up putting in over 100, and the reason is because, first, we found a lot of important things going on in the field—but beyond that, you spent a lot of time orienting and reorienting me to the building itself. I specifically remember our nondisabled peers being like, [joking] “You must really love those brownies and cookies at the coffee shop because you spend so much time there!” [laughs] Honestly, while we did spend significantly more time than our nondisabled peers spent at sites of observation, we had to, to compensate for what we were missing. Because every time we went, and bear in mind, we went on the same days at the exact same hours, there would always be something new to pick up on.

Exactly. Yet, when most people conceptualize participant observation, they never even consider what it would be like to navigate the field without sight, let alone conduct research. Participant observation is entrenched in ableist assumptions. These assumptions create barriers that reify an expectation of nondisability in the research process.

Participant observation, as a method, is riddled with assumptions. These assumptions don’t necessarily inherently label disability as negative; instead, they leave disability out of the conversation entirely. Without considering the experiences of disabled scholars, participant observation creates barriers that reinforce standards of nondisability and neurotypicality. This creates less diversity and inclusivity in the field overall.

Totally! The systems at play here are sneakily ableist. When fieldwork is so reliant on vision, it inherently disables individuals who are using these methods, because the assumption is not only that you can see, but the assumption is also that you will be in a space which allows you to really be able to just take everything in with ease. So, participant observation is specifically implicitly discriminatory, as it assumes that someone will have sight, and that they will be nondisabled. And I think it is important to point out that the scholars who came up with participant observation were not doing it to disadvantage disabled scholars. Why would they, if they’ve never had a personal relationship to disability? Disability is just always left out of the conversation, so they didn’t know. And that’s what it is, but I am hoping we can find ways to see ourselves and our bodies fully included in ethnographic work.

Well said, I completely agree. Beyond sight, participant observation almost always comes with an expectation of fieldnotes. In my experience, writing fieldnotes can be extremely discouraging, as the expectation is that fieldnotes will be long, robust, and extremely detailed. I see the merit in that, but as someone with chronic pain in my hands, writing or typing can be excruciating after a while. I found myself often pushing through pain, primarily to make sure I wasn’t “doing a disservice” to our project. I recognize my own assumptions in that way, but they’re informed by what I see and hear around me in the academy every day.

Field notes are also a struggle for me, as someone who writes and reads using Braille and a screen-reader. When I am using my screen-reader, I am oftentimes relying on my memory to remember everything I just observed. When writing fieldnotes, I can’t just use a pen and paper for scratch notes. I also can’t hone in on dialogue in particularly loud environments. In that way, headnotes are also impossible. While I could record the action going on using the voice recorder on my phone, I would still have the same problem. It’s not always possible to ask another peer to come to that space and take notes, because we have to be good ethnographers and immerse ourselves in this space, right? But often times, I assume that scholars only take seriously those ethnographers that use all five senses in the field. However, I do believe we can push back on what this notion of “good” ethnography is. Though scholars like Conquergood used all five senses in the field and his ethnographic work was celebrated for that, ethnographic work can look like different things to different ethnographers, which is the beauty of ethnography. Just because we are impaired by the space certainly does not mean that ethnography by disabled scholars is not “good,” or “worthy,” or anything of that magnitude. Just the opposite. I hope this is the first step to breaking ground. I should say that good research is often done collaboratively. Not only does it enhance trustworthiness to have another peer come to the site of observation such as the coffee shop, but it also allows for more perspectives that could be different to be heard. Collaboration with multiple perspectives is a wonderful endeavor, especially in ethnography.

One hundred percent. Even if you’re typing, the expectation is that you will either write a substantial amount of fieldnotes in the moment, or you will need to rely on “headnotes”–the problem with headnotes, though, is that they assume that people can easily write extensively from memory. These assumptions then discount differing experiences of neurodiversity. What do you do if you can’t take notes in the moment but can’t articulate every aspect of the experience from memory?

Yeah, you can’t always flesh out these fieldnotes. It’s really difficult to have robust fieldnotes when you can’t see what’s going on, thus leading to choppy or even incomplete fieldnotes, and not a lot of important detail, which is required for qualitative scholars.

Absolutely. Further, the idea that we’re supposed to have this rich, thick description is great; however, in my case I may not be able to physically write 100 pages of fieldnotes, for example, whereas you have the other struggle of, how do you get enough detail in there to fill those page expectations? It’s important to reshape our conversations around validity to account for accessibility.

And I really couldn’t fill a bunch of pages, because I would miss detail and context. So, our first draft of our analysis was really rough because I specifically was missing things just because I couldn’t see what was right in front of me.

Right. And you know, every time we’d go through each other’s fieldnotes, it would be like a ‘Wow, I didn’t pick up on that’ or “Wow, I had no idea,” and that’s not the fault of you or I, that’s the fault of the method. How can anyone be expected to pick up on everything? Participant observation, and the expectations around it, were developed without disability in mind. As a result, we are structurally excluded from the method as a result of policies, procedures, and expectations. Participant observation, as it stands currently, is (re)producing scholarly disablement.

I think it is also necessary to highlight concerns surrounding time constraints. They are a huge barrier to why scholars don’t conduct participant observation as a primary method because honestly, it is very time-consuming. No study is going to be seen as legitimate; no study is going to be taken seriously with only 15 hours of participant observation.

And we felt like it was so important that we get upwards of 120 hours so that people in our home discipline will take us seriously. People are certainly disadvantaged by that time barrier. You may not have the time or the physical capability to exist in a space for as long as it is necessary for people to view and accept your study as valid. This expectation creates an implicit bias in research, where those with the privilege of time and physical endurance are seen as more rigorous or legitimate scholars. If the standards of validity in participant observation continue to ignore accessibility, then they will continue to exclude valuable perspectives, reinforcing the systemic barriers that keep disabled scholars from fully engaging in academic inquiry.

The physical structures of accessibility can be really frustrating. For me personally, participant observation, while it’s a really wonderful method, I’m going to critique it, because not only is it really difficult and disorienting to be in a space where you are expected to be able to see, but also, when there are a million and one things going on in that space, you can’t necessarily focus specifically on one thing, So, the expectation of participant observation is that you’ll be able to fit, that you’ll be able to feasibly take field notes, and that you are going to be able to see. And if you can’t see, then you are stuck relying on others. Because people are so kind, and they want to help, and they want to do the right thing, but then I’m also taking away from their day.

As it stands right now, participant observation feels like it sets us up for discouragement in academia. So many things are working against us, concepts of validation, rigor, quality—they all work to set a nondisabled, neurotypical scholarly standard. I feel like these standards can disadvantage anyone that falls outside of traditional societal norms.

I think one thing we can do is what we’re doing right now [with this duoethnographic exploration]. We can really be making sure that people know that they can use this method, but it has its limitations. The first thing that I think is, we really need to be able to critique the structure. We know that current understandings of participant observation as a method are disabling. And so, academia assumes that one will be able to see and will be able to write up this analysis, and code data that is so “rich” and “thick.” But really, we need to evaluate the standards of qualitative research.

Exactly. By critically examining the structure of participant observation, we’re not just pointing out its flaws; we’re advocating for a more inclusive approach to qualitative research. The expectation that “rich” and “thick” data can only be obtained through traditional methods inherently excludes those who navigate the field differently. Instead of forcing ourselves to fit into an ableist framework, we should be expanding the definition of what constitutes valid and meaningful research. If academia truly values diverse perspectives, then it needs to recognize that accessibility isn’t a limitation—it’s an opportunity to reshape the way we engage with and produce knowledge.

Yeah, absolutely, and I think that, starting in this paper, our perspectives are really going to be important for not only the work that we do in critiquing the systems, but in also putting forth newer expectations of participant observation and what it can do as a method for disabled scholars.

Well said. We should always remember that we have power, even when situations make us feel powerless. When we read, review, or engage with papers, we can argue that it’s equitable to consider studies with less hours of participant observation and less pages of field notes overall. As disablement is structural, attitudinal, and environmental, I want to always be cognizant of the ways that academic structures have shaped implicitly ableist and neuronormative thinking. Our job as qualitative scholars is to create equitable and accessible knowledge while highlighting the voices of our participants. We can absolutely do that while pushing back on traditional understandings of qualitative methods. Just because a study doesn’t fit the status quo doesn’t mean that it lacks value or contributions.

Though qualitative methods are broad, flexibility is important in discussing how to be more inclusive. When we put forth neurotypical and nondisabled expectations of participant observation, we are missing an opportunity to attempt to make these systems more accessible. This is only the first step in attempting to make fieldwork more inclusive. Although we still have a long way to go to ensure equitability and accessibility, we will continue to ask hard questions, challenge our assumptions, and make fieldwork a more accessible experience for disabled scholars.