What when we have grown up?

“What when we have grown up?” dives into Marieke Vandecasteele’s doctoral research trajectory in a space between art and science. From her own position as a family mem­ber, the researcher starts to collect experiences of families of people with a label and makes trips to others who made visual or auditory creations about their sibling with a label.

This book is a patchwork consisting of ‘patches’ rather than ‘chapters’, where different studies are stitched together. These patches take very different forms: sometimes through images, sometimes through film, sometimes through audio, sometimes through written texts, … In an affective way, it always opens up new ways of looking at and collaborating with families of people with a label. Making-thinking-doing is central: starting from making visual or/and auditory creations and relational encounters, com­bined with posthumanist literature, exciting cross-pollinations emerge that make space for other forms of knowledge in academia.

This creative research can inspire practioners in welfare contexts as well students and researchers who are searching what research-creation practices can be(come) in the context of supporting families with labels.

Marieke Vandecasteele is working as researcher/filmmaker at the Department of Special Needs Education, Ghent University. Drawing on auto-visual ethnography, she investigates family culture of people with a disability label within the theoretical frame­work of Disability Studies, always starting from the creativity that lives within families.

This PhD was supervised by Prof. dr. Geert Van Hove and Prof. dr. Elisabeth De Schauwer of the Department of Special Needs Education at Ghent University.