Walking-With as a Co-creative Research Practice With Young Disabled Adults at the Postsecondary Transition

Research Context: Gabria, Wout, and George

This research began with three young disabled people: Gabria, Wout, and George. The first author started getting to know each of them individually through regular meetings starting in 2019. These early encounters laid the foundation for an approach of walking-with: being together regularly, doing things together, thus adjusting to each other’s rhythms, and collaboratively making sense of their lives and desires.

Gabria was an 18-year-old expressive young woman with Down syndrome who loves to dance and act. Her path led us toward exploring new possibilities for increasing her capacity in dance. Network meetings were organized with those close to her: her parents, sister, neighbor, support workers, and the first author. In these meetings, Gabria chose a topic to discuss and usually begins by presenting a PowerPoint. Afterward, she would write down her thoughts, and we would ask questions to support her reflections. The collaboration with the researchers took place across varied settings: walking to her internship, visits to her school, or conversations in a café with her network. For Gabria, doing things together was more meaningful than talking as such, especially when words did not fully carry her intentions. For me, the first author, this process of getting to know her, was a search mingled with an engagement to support her and an eagerness and gratitude to learn from her situation.

Wout, also 18 at the start of the research, is a humorous and thoughtful young man, labeled with Down syndrome. At the time, he was finishing in a regular, secondary school and participating in multiple internship placements in his vocational training for logistics. These placements helped him reflect on his preferences, tasks he enjoyed, and the kind of environment in which he thrived. The first author met Wout at his school or at university, always supported by his mother or support worker. Wout preferred meeting at the university, where he enjoyed working on his “future dream book”—a project where he explored his hopes and desires. Through participating in moments that mattered in Wout’s life, the research became attuned to what was important to him. Our process together grew from shyness toward me (first author) to sharing his humor making me laugh so often. He flourished and I got the opportunity to witness it through being-with him.

George’s—also 18 at the start—support needs are connected to the label of dyspraxia. Most of his meetings with the first author took place in his favorite bookshop. He also invited her to his school, where she joined him during cooking lessons and conversations with his support teacher. She attended meetings with his teachers and parents near the end of his school year. George found it important to talk in spaces where he felt at ease. He expressed a need to widen his horizons and push back against the expectation of entering full-time work too soon. George presented himself very gentle and careful, making it comfortable for me (first author) to talk with him. I was impressed by his capacity to reflect and his engagement with his family and social justice.

The first author continues to walk-with Gabria and Wout today. The collaboration with George ended after 2 years. The second author remains closely connected with the trajectories of the young people, having worked with Parents for Inclusion for over 20 years.

Methodological Movements toward Emancipatory Co-creative Research

Emancipatory research aims to amplify the voices of marginalized groups, including disabled individuals (e.g., Bollard et al., 2018; Butler & Derrett, 2014; Gjermestad et al., 2017; Hogger et al., 2023). Participatory approaches contribute to this field by emphasizing the active involvement of disabled individuals throughout the research process (Nind, 2017; Welsby & Horsfall, 2011).

In this study, we engaged with a more accessible approach fostered by postqualitative inquiry and we positioned ourselves in a role of following the desires and movements of the young people—immersing ourselves in the lived experiences of young disabled people with attentiveness to what emerged (Davies, 2014; Vandenbussche & De Schauwer, 2024). This meant that the conditions shaping their lives did not just inform the research, but they became the research itself.

We remain critical to the idea that all “missing” voices (Allan, 2008) can be addressed and raised through methodological inclusion. We think that many more classic research methods can restrain more creative ways of understanding people’s lives and still leave behind a lot of input from disabled people that cannot express themselves so easily in a verbal way or in preset moments the research takes place. Moreover, many of these approaches still rest on a belief in knowable, stable truths that can be uncovered through predetermined steps. Within such a view, humans are positioned as autonomous subjects, privileged to take a neutral position and capable of stepping outside the world to discover its essential truths. Yet poststructuralist and posthuman thinkers—including Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, and Derrida—challenge these assumptions. They rethink the subject not as a stable entity, but as constructed through discourse and powerrelationships. This calls for a reconsidering of research itself, contributing to what is called the ontological turn (Mazzei & Jackson, 2024; St Pierre, 2016, 2021). This ontological shift embraces a one-world ontology of immanence: a world in which there are no strict separations between humans and nonhumans, concepts and matter, and self and other. In this view, reality is in continuous variation and constant becoming, rather than a collection of static, pre-given entities. Knowledge then is never simply “collected”—it is enacted, co-produced, and shaped by the ontological force of relations (Jackson & Mazzei, 2017; Mazzei & Jackson, 2024). A key implication of this perspective is that objects of knowledge are not passive or inert things simply waiting to be interpreted by humans. Instead, they are active “doings” with ontological force—they participate in the very reality they are a part of, rather than being separate from it (Jackson & Mazzei, 2017; Mazzei & Jackson, 2024). We were drawn to a co-creative postqualitative approach that is “permanently contingent in its emergence and responsiveness to involuntary, relational encounters—all of which open space for invention and creation” (Mazzei & Jackson, 2024, p. 3). This orientation brought us into dialogue with disability studies, in which we share a commitment to challenging the deficit framing of disability (Titchkosky et al., 2022). We understand disability as a socially and materially produced phenomenon shaped by ableist norms that privilege the “able” body and manifest as both structural and symbolic barriers.

The relationship between disability studies, posthumanism, and postqualitative inquiry is not seamless, yet posthuman disability studies offers what Kafer (2013) calls affirmative disability futurities. Murray (2020) maps key intersections between critical disability studies and posthumanism, arguing that these fields unsettle humanist assumptions of a centered and autonomous subject. Rather than resolving the differences between them, we follow Murray’s invitation to treat their intersection as a site of productive friction—opening speculative possibilities rather than confirming theoretical certainties. As Murray notes, the posthuman is “what might come next, after, beyond, or outside the human,” operating primarily as critique through the decentring of the wholeness of the human (2020, p. 12).

While some strands of posthumanism align with technocrip imaginaries—transhumanism, cyborg subjectivities (Romanska, 2024)—our work aligns with the new materialist strand (Goodley et al., 2019). This offers conceptual tools for understanding disability through entanglements of the material and discursive, the embodied and cultural, the human and nonhuman. It shifts our attention from what bodies are to what bodies do within assemblages of people, matter, concepts and practices. We do not want to focus on a disabled individual as such, but from this new materialist approach look for other constellations of disability that arise as a consequence of intra-acting people, matter, and discourses (Barad, 2007). Rather than focusing on what a disabled person tells or shares, we step into what disability as a layered and complex idea opens.

This makes space for identities and futures that are not predetermined but emergent. This approach raises a tension with identity-first politics, which has been essential for visibility, rights and recognition in disability activism. Yet poststructuralist thought invites us to approach identity as relational, situated and in flux—“a transition” always in the process of being and becoming (Probyn, 1996). Following Hickey-Moody (personal communication, 14-11-2023; Hickey-Moody & Willcox, 2019), we argue that posthumanism need not negate identity politics; rather, it reframes it. The value of the posthuman lies in decentring the self-contained individual and recognizing becoming as relational.

Thus, following Murray (2020), questioning identity politics does not imply abandoning rights, autonomy or agency. Instead, it signals a shift in starting point: away from a fixed idea of “the human” and toward what Romanska (2024) describes as a destabilized account of the body, its capacities and its place in established hierarchies opening space for imagining future otherwise.

In the same vein, our approach to research with Gabria, Wout, and George did not treat them as isolated individuals, but as young people constantly becoming through and with their environments—their homes, schools, passions, and support networks. In walking-with, we stepped into what disability as a layered and complex phenomenon might make possible.

We aimed to offer a counterweight to tragic narratives of disability, remembering that “disabled people are always other than what society made us and believes us to be” (Stiker, 1999, p. 51). Our work aligns with international movements emphasizing lived experiences and insider perspectives, grounded in direct engagements with disabled people and their communities. We critically examine normative approaches while advocating for affirmative understandings of disability. By looking at the young people through an entangled lens—with openness to emergence and attention to relationality—we witnessed their capacities unfold.

That is how the stories or events were enacted through shared experiences in which walking, talking, and collaborating are enmeshed. At times, this involved the researcher joining school meetings, reflecting together on support needs, or simply being present in moments of transition and choice. The work was grounded in an ethical commitment to imagining a more just world, through rethinking and returning to theories, concepts, and lived stories. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of assemblage offers a way to think about these shifting, relational dynamics. Assemblages are multidirectional, rhizomatic networks of affect, connection, and becoming. They bring together bodies, objects, ideas, and histories—generating meaning through their interrelation rather than through fixed and static identities. We began to see voice as layered: not just the literal act of speaking, but shaped by discourses, histories, other people, and other moments (Mazzei, 2016). Experience speaks not only through words, but through gestures, actions, silences, and atmospheres—signs (Deleuze, 1964) we tried to interpret and understand from an affective connection with them. It is within this frame that we explore the method of walking-with: What does it mean to walk-with disabled young people in research? What does it make possible and what does it allow us to hear?

Introducing Walking-With as a Method

As explained above, in our research we chose to go on the road together, to encounter and to experience together. This unfolded in different ways across the various stories.

We meet George as eloquent, eager to share, and bighearted. This encounter takes place at a location of his choosing, where we sit and talk over drinks. Gabria and Wout need something different. With them too, we begin from what feels comfortable, from their desires and passions. The first author walked with the three young adults over several years, at particular moments linked to transition. This meant building a relationship in which we came to understand their ways of communicating, their desires and passions, support needs, networks, future steps, and the multiplicity of their capabilities.

Our approach was grounded in contact and encounter. We learned the rhythms and pace of the young people. We learned about their challenges and the difficulty of resisting dominant expectations. This way of moving together stayed close to the young people and their networks.

It aligned with a posthuman critical disability studies perspective that emphasizes listening to the lived experiences of disabled people, striving to respect their rights and remaining open to multiple readings of disability. We took process and becoming as ever-enduring, beginning in the midst of complexities. We adopted a starting position of not knowing, moving away from a fixed idea of the subject as a clearly delineated individual, and instead entered into the stories from the events we were part of (Manning, 2016).

In the next section, we present some snapshots of events. Elsewhere (Vandenbussche et al., 2023; Vandenbussche & De Schauwer, 2024), we explore the complexity of these events in more depth, co-creating with the young people and their networks opportunities to develop their future dreams and passions. In this article, our focus is on walking-with as a co-creative approach to inquiring into these stories. We first describe how the method emerged from practice, illustrated through snapshots from the stories of the young adults. We then explore its theoretical underpinnings through the concepts of event, intuition, and wonder.

Snapshots of Events

When we walked with the three young disabled adults, we began to collect significant “events”—happenings in the course of life that became meaningful for the young people and illustrated the directions they wanted to take. In this article, we uplift only a few snapshots to show how such events can be opened up.

Together with Gabria, we mapped what kind of job she truly wanted to pursue and explored her path into adult life during a network meeting at home. She used the focus on employment as a springboard to explore new lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), tracing connections to other desires and dreams alongside her support network. Among these, the line of dance emerged as the most important. We accompanied her to a school in the center of a student town in Flanders.

At this new secondary school—where Gabria wants to develop additional dance skills—she introduces herself to a group gathered around a table: her parents, her support workers, the head of the school, the special needs coordinator, and me (the first author). She has prepared a photo album. Slowly turning the pages, she narrates each involvement in a new dance project—explaining who is present, where it took place, and what she was doing. Gabria makes wave-like movements with her hand to prevent stuttering. Her voice trembles. Now and then she clears her throat or giggles behind her hand. Her parents’ blinking eyes are intensely focused on her.

Although this might seem a very small event, for Gabria this is a huge step. She had to hear a lot that she is incapable, unable to learn, to grow, or to follow her dreams. She and her network have battled for inclusive opportunities in society many times. What Gabria illustrates here, is how by presuming competence (Biklen, 2020) of her parents and those close to her, she manages to show herself as a desiring young woman taking steps to chase her dreams about dancing. These encounters with Gabria exemplify the kind of situated knowing that walking-with entails—where knowledge arises not from direct questioning, but from co-experiencing.

George takes me into his family history and reflects on how those meaningful to him shape his own agency and desire. Surrounded by books—a passion of his since childhood—George speaks respectfully about the social and political engagement of his grandmother, mother, aunt, and niece. He especially honours his grandmother, whose garden he arranged for a family feast and who was awarded an honorary doctorate for her contributions to women’s rights. She passed away a few years ago. George expresses a strong desire to contribute as well; he wants to make a difference. Yet he also discloses: his deepest fear is that he’s “not good enough.” He struggles with organization and fine-motor tasks. Others suggest he is suited for industrial kitchen work. He is unconvinced. He says he needs more time. Being rushed only heightens his anxiety and undermines his ability. He welcomes feedback but asks for respect and understanding.

This snapshot illuminates the complexity of assemblage. The researchers were drawn to it because it reveals the many lines of desire, people, and ideas interwoven in conversations about transition. In a society in which neoliberal ideals about independency and self-sufficiency are valued highly, these ideals put a lot of pressure on people. Disabled people teach us other ways to live the transition based on more communal values of interdependency and care. The snapshot also foregrounds the power of duration—how George’s personal history continues to shape his present decisions and longings.

Wout and his support worker, Saartje, come to the university to discuss his different job ideas. We sit in the kitchen, which serves as our meeting room. Wout talks about his internship experiences: cleaning, administrative work at a university college, assisting in a hospital warehouse, and helping in the administrative office of his school. This variety has helped him to reflect on what he enjoys and where his strengths lie. He decides to create a book, renaming it his Future Dream Book. In this book, he wants to include photos that show who he is—what he loves, what he dislikes, and what kinds of support he needs. Together, we discuss the use of reflection documents to help him grow into his tasks.

Wonder and imagination are deeply entangled with Wout’s story. We keep being surprised by Wout’s cleverness and try to get grip on the steps he and his network take. We feel inspired by the word “dream,” it is evocative to think about other futurities for young disabled people. We begin to perceive the importance of imagining alternative futures that resist the often predetermined paths of disabled people. Wout challenges stereotypical ideas about intellectual disability in many ways. He follows the news daily and engages in conversations about history and current affairs. In class, he was the one creating quizzes for the group. What labels mean changes depending on context, individual, network, and so on. We are challenged to wonder and imagine on the basis of concrete events and situations.

The assemblages surrounding these young adults emerge powerfully through listening to events. Transition often confronts young disabled people with the reality that they may not meet the neoliberal ideal of the efficient, autonomous, and fast worker. Yet each of the young people dared to think in terms of possibility, reclaiming themselves as whole individuals with many competencies. Tentatively, they began to imagine life directions that felt right to them, moving through pauses and thresholds of slowness and reflection.

Opening up the Events

By opening up voice and making it more complex, we also unraveled alternative ways of “listening.” We did not only attend to what the young adults said—we wit(h)nessed (Boscacci, 2018) how they moved, acted, and included us in small events from their lives. Angela Molloy Murphy (2024, p. 323) calls for polyphonic storying, “or storying with a multitude of more-than-human voices [which] invokes a pluriverse of connectivity, reciprocities, possibilities and speculative visions for living otherwise.” The events we encountered opened up these pluriversal connections, drawing our attention to what matters in duration and in the multiplicity of concrete happenings in these young people’s lives. In this way, story assemblages came into being—stories that did not exist before (Molloy Murphy, 2024, p. 325).

Sharing events about Gabria offers deeper insight than a straightforward interview might provide. For her, it was difficult to fluently answer direct questions such as “What job would you like to do?” One of the first times we met, we sat together in a café drinking apple juice. She watched me quietly. She started to write about job ideas, but we got stuck and decided to go away into some shops. There she opened up, her discomfort melted away. We walked with her and noticed when she radiated excitement and joy. So, we listened to her network, her writing, her spoken words, and her dancing. We began experimenting: What can these events tell us about Gabria’s desire for inclusive work? We started from a desire to hear Gabria in a way that worked for her, but noticed it also opened up other insights for us as researchers.

For Wout, this process involved humor and play. We noticed that his attunement with Saartje enabled him to share his thoughts more openly. His imagination and cleverness suffused our conversations and materialized in his Future Dream Book. A vital aspect of his journey was learning to reflect on daily experiences and articulate his needs. Through the connections built around this portfolio, he could express what he desired, what mattered, and his deep interest in politics, history, and languages.

With George, there was a quiet seriousness and care in both his speech and movement. His sensitivity did not prevent him from making his own choices. The meeting space—his favorite bookshop—and the quality of listening were particularly meaningful to him. Though more eloquent than Gabria and Wout, he performed his desires. We listened to signs in our relationality, such as the memory of the books for him, the strong affect for his grandmother, and the quiet and careful interaction with his teacher and peers.

Each of these young disabled adults brought us along familiar, processual life paths. They invited us to join and follow parts of their journeys, offering doorways into what matters to them in pursuing an inclusive life.

We felt the need to walk-with the young disabled people, allowing shared experiences of opportunity and constraint while remaining close to their desires and support needs. We did not take off with a clear plan, but decided to follow and to see where the young people would take us. In our walking-with, we were often literally on the road—immersing ourselves in the eventfulness of George, Wout, and Gabria’s daily lives. It is, at its core, a method of trying to understand young people’s desires and needs through relational engagement while following—implying that not we, the researchers, decide next steps in the research, but the young people do by demonstrating what they need in their lives and we follow their pace and their movements in concrete life situations. In the next section we will unpack the theoretical underpinnings of the method of walking-with.

Unfolding Walking-With as Events of Engagement with Situated Knowledges

At times, walking-with was quite literal—such as the day Gabria and I (the first author) walked together to her internship at a nursing home, or when I joined George in his school kitchen or participated in a meeting at Wout’s school alongside his teachers and network. More often, however, walking-with was figurative, representing a commitment to being present with them (Molloy Murphy, 2024) in both the significant and everyday moments of their lives. Walking-with refers to all the little encounters through which we came to know more about who they are and how they navigate the world.

Important others—such as Gabria’s family, Wout’s mother and support teacher, and George’s teacher and support worker—were invaluable in this relational process of following. Engaging with events meant stepping into and alongside stories that were always already entangled with their networks. Other people and material conditions are part of these assemblages, shaping the open futures of the young disabled people and offering bridges for researchers. It was through these entanglements that our understanding of walking-with began to deepen.

Walking-with involves and has involved movement—moving together. Manning (2009) explains that “Walking-with is not taking a step, it is creating a movement.” We use the hyphen to emphasize this entanglement and constant becoming. Walking-with is our attempt to approach reality anew, with a not-knowing and unprejudiced eye. We used walking methods as speculative practices (Springgay & Truman, 2017).

Walking methodologies are concerned with feminist, queer, trans, anti-racist, anti-ableist, and anti-colonial walking practices connected to create just futures. This aligns with our endeavor to use this method to imagine different futurities for young disabled people. Thanks to the interconnection between critical disability studies and postqualitative and posthuman work, other lines of story and other lines of reading disability could emerge. It is why postfoundational readings are valuable for the field of disability studies. The stories of these young people did not emerge through direct questions. From the immanent ontological conception in the new materialist posthuman thinking we do not look for representation of what the young people tell, but we move toward a performative relational togethering in their concrete lifestories. Taylor and Fairchild (2025) elaborate on how walking connects us to the entangled relationalities between humans and more-than-humans, also involving histories that continue to intra-act with our doings and thoughts. In this way, specific (in)tensions must be immanent to whatever method is used in research (Springgay & Truman, 2017, p. 2).

An influential moment in thinking about walking-with is the conversation between Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor (youtubefilm), where they discuss the meaning of taking a walk. Documaci (2023) refers to the pressure of the habitus of ableism, in which walking might be seen as the only valuable way of moving because it is approached as an innate ability we are all supposed to have. In this regard, Documaci (2023, p. 78) talks about the danger of “walkism”: “the expectation that everybody can and should walk, and that those who walk have an entitlement to take space and utilize the offerings of the world at the expense of those who do not”. Still, Taylor—who uses a wheelchair—also speaks about “taking a walk” and uses it in a way of talking about being on the move, not referring to the literal act of walking.

In empirical research, Butler and Derrett (2014) use the walking interview as an ethnographic method to understand disability. Their approach still centers the interview as method, using walking as a setting in which questions are asked. Bartlett et al. (2023) offer a synthesized review of such approaches. On the intersection of disability studies and post-philosophies, Eliza Chandler et al. (2019) connect walking methods with cripistemologies—generating crip knowledges through producing non-normative ways of walking/traversing together. Powell (2020) explores StoryWalks as a methodology that continually constructs new relations and interactions with the world. She also approaches walking as a speculative methodology of movement, an event that is constituted by more-than-human relations. What these various contributions share, is an emphasis on the openings created by the movement and act of walking.

Engaging more deeply with this method challenged us to articulate more explicitly what we mean by moving together while following. We use walking-with as a way to weave ourselves as researchers into the polyvocal assembled stories of the young people. We value the notion of walking because it carries with it slowness and speed, groundedness, obstacles, and the intentional pace of progress. It also holds space for small significant changes, humor, and hope, making it possible for us to be attentive to signs that matter.

Our emphasis lies on moving together through concrete, situated events. This involves stepping into processes as they unfold, trying to make sense and attain what Arendt (1992) calls an enlarged mentality. She argues that reason cannot be isolated but must always exist in community. Enlarged mentality requires one to expand one’s thoughts by taking the perspectives of others into account, cultivating impartiality from particularities. This expansion is made possible through imagination. Arendt writes that enlarged mentality involves critical thinking—thinking for oneself, resisting prejudice and passivity, and embracing the idea that “to think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting” (Arendt, 1992, p. 43). This is not about greater empathy, but rather about stepping beyond one’s subjective and private conditions, enlarging one’s perspective by imaginatively shifting from one standpoint to another. For us, enlarged mentality has meant thinking from the event itself—paying close attention to compelling signs of everyone and everything involved.

Unfolding Walking-With as Immersion in Welling Events Open for Intuition and Wonder

Walking-with offers a way of translating our understanding of change and duration into our research practices. Inspired by Bergson’s method of intuition (1911/2014), we began to immerse ourselves in concrete events. This immersion required us to become entangled within occurrences themselves, aligning with our conceptualization of assemblages. We draw on Bloch’s notion of the event, seen as both an instantaneous moment and an unfolding process (Thompson, 2012). Engaging with events in this way meant, on one hand, entering enduring processes through the method of intuition (Bergson, 1911/2014). On the other, it involved attending to welling events—emergent, sometimes imperceptible movements that arise in the practice of walking-with (Manning, 2016). Manning describes welling as the incipient stirrings of what is coming into being. She invites us to begin “in the middle,” “where immanent modes of thinking-making-doing come from within the processes themselves, not from outside them” (Springgay & Truman, 2018, p. 206).

For Bergson, everything endures—process is the center of reality (1907/2018; 1911/2014; 1946/1997). He advocates for an openness to novelty, resisting the pull of familiar representations. To achieve this, intuition calls for immersion which implies entering a situation or object deeply enough to understand it from within (Bergson, 1946/1997). He emphasizes the need to return to duration, not to observe from outside, but to “recapture reality in the very mobility which is its essence” (Bergson, 1911/2014, p. 31). This philosophical approach will demand new efforts for every new “problem.” The goal is to perceive succession not as juxtaposition, “Intuition, then, signifies first of all consciousness, but immediate consciousness, a vision which is scarcely distinguishable from the object seen, a knowledge which is contact and even coincidence” (Bergson, 1911/2014, p. 32). For us, this meant finding ways to become part of the unfolding stories on an immanent plane of connected events, as participants actively moving with and within events. Our encounter with Gabria at the train station where she, her mother, her support teacher, support worker, and both of the authors gathered to discuss her future is an example. Gabria was crafting a new brainstorming document, organizing her ideas through webs of words. One idea, “summer sciences,” prompted her mother to ask what she meant. As the conversation unfolded, it became clear that her desire was to travel. Gabria was listened to with care and respect. These processes take time, but her network always remains as close as possible to her desires. We sought to co-create a research process rooted in her own perspectives and those of her close network. What began as taking small steps together, evolved into moving-with—a dynamic, ongoing collaboration that embraced uncertainty.

In line with the above explained approach from postqualitative and (new materialist) posthuman strands, we avoided adopting a predefined notion of the future, an important concern in contexts where disabled individuals are often positioned within fixed societal scripts. In Flanders, dominant discourses suggest that disabled people are best served in protected environments (Vandenbussche et al., 2023). Yet in the assemblages we engaged with, we witnessed powerful trajectories driven by passions, talents, and interests. This required us to adopt an attitude of openness and curiosity, thus allowing young people the space to shape the process and direct its course. For Wout, one such moment was his presentation of his Future Dream Book as a graduation final. He positioned himself as a young man seeking meaningful participation in work life. He moved fluidly between Dutch and English and demonstrated his strong knowledge of history and politics. These moments of wonder called for deeper engagement. Drawing on Davies (2014, p. 107), we understand these as moments of emergent listening which is a practice to “open oneself to the resonance of the other and become other through the process of evolution that takes one beyond the already known.” This mode of listening begins with unknowing, dwelling at the edge of what is already understood, being open for something new to emerge. As MacLure (2013) explains, wonder is relational. These events chose us and we experience a mutual affection that urges us to further connect with them to see what the events produce. These sticky moments invite careful listening and following—being led by the young disabled people we walk-with. Our inquiry thus also involves a close reading of philosophy, a thorough engagement with concepts, and what Lenz Taguchi (2017) calls thinking-with-concepts or what Jackson and Mazzei (2017) describe as thinking with theory.

Unfolding Walking-With as Becoming Spider-Sense Researchers

Walking-with is not an “apparatus of capture” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Manning, 2016). Rather than looking to contain or define, it opens up relational processes that allow us to make sense of the lived transitions of young disabled people at specific moments in their lives. In this view, relationality is what emerges in the interval—between thoughts, words, and acts. This aligns with the complexity of assemblages, illustrating how walking-with developed into a deepening process of relational intensity, where becoming-with (Haraway, 2008, 2016) took shape. Haraway (2008, 2016) conceptualizes becoming-with as the ongoing intra-actions that constitute being-in-the-world. It concerns a relational pattern in which “to be one is always to become with many” (Haraway, 2008, p. 4, italics original). These intra-actions involve mutual influence and open possibilities to act in certain ways, connected to what Haraway calls “rendering capable.” George, Gabria, and Wout rendered us capable of beginning to understand the complexities of transition for young disabled adults. Simultaneously, the relations between ourselves as researchers, the young people, their parents, and the material or affective conditions of our shared encounters—such as spaces of exchange—also rendered them capable of acting in new ways.

This dynamic relationship was and continues to be a non-linear learning process. Drawing on Deleuze, MacLure (2024) refers to the spider-sense of the postfoundational researcher. It is not about seeing, hearing or touching in the conventional sense, but about a heightened sensitivity to the signs and signals that arise within an inquiry. It is this process of being attentive for signs that matters, those minor happenings that are easily overlooked and barely noticeable that demand attention, even though it is not even clear where this attention should be directed toward.

Walking-with is an ethical process in itself in which we raised questions about how to participate events, how to attend to voices, and how to avoid pure representation of what these young people shared. We walk-with these questions, concepts, stories, and the young people themselves. In doing so, we do not want to steer the research according to our own agendas, but to begin from the desires of the young disabled people.

Ethics and care are not external constraints imposed on this inquiry; they circulate through the very positions we occupy as researchers and as co-participants in shared webs of relation. The research encounter itself becomes part of the event, a strand within the web, continually vibrating, shifting, and offering new lines of connection.