Narrative portraits: affirmative approaches to understanding learning disability in the everyday

Narrative portraits provide an opportunity to uncover new affirmative understandings of disability and family through the focus on lived experiences. This article will explore how a critical disability studies lens helps us understand narrative approaches and the crip potentials of narrative portraits. Considering the ‘joy deficit’ within disability research this paper highlights the disruptive potential narrative portraits bring to family sociology and disability studies. This paper presents a narrative portrait as a case study, taken from research carried out with 14 siblings of people with learning disabilities from the UK. This is used to explore how siblings of people with learning disabilities understand disability in the everyday with a focus on the affirmative and disruptive counter-narrative nature of the portrait. Through this, the potential for counter-narratives within this methodology will be made clear with the unique nature of sibling relationships central to this. Narrative inquiry can challenge dominant deficit understandings of disability through narrative repair. Narrative portraits take this further through the focus on participants’ words in longer extracts allowing their viewpoints to be centred. This approach lends itself to studies of the everyday through the space afforded for deeper, nuanced accounts of life. The approach crips more classic narrative research methods through challenging normative understandings of the researcher’s role in favour of a more participant-centred approach to analysis. In doing so, there is potential to imagine a more inclusive scholarship. When addressed through a disability lens, narrative portraiture uncovers lived experiences of disability, how disability is navigated in families, and how siblings negotiate disability in their relationships allowing the nuances of everyday experiences of disability to arise.