The bricolage of documentary and disability

Documentary film has played a significant role in the social construction of disability and this paper aims to make an explicit connection between these two fields in order to understand better how the tools of documentary studies and disability studies can be brought to bear in understanding the past and the current potential of documentary in the socio-cultural construction and awareness of disability. Content: The paper discusses the academic underpinnings of my forthcoming edited book “Documentary and Disability” (Palgrave, 2017; co-edited with Helen Hughes). In the process of bringing the volume together we have come to understand it as a ‘bricolage’, a term that chimes with our aim to demonstrate that a cross-disciplinary merger between documentary and disability is both a creative and a critical way to shed light on two concepts that are in a constant process of change. Derrida has explained the pertinence of the term bricolage for theoretical discourse, arguing that the process of taking on and adapting existing terms in a trial-and-error manner from heterogeneous contexts amounts to a critique of the very discourse and the language it uses (p. 360, 1967/1978). Thus, the paper will illuminate the topic not only from an academic perspective, but will also offer a practice-focussed viewpoint from a practice-led researcher