Tales from the fences: Disability, Rurality, Autoethnography, Performative ethnography, Colombia
Disability, Rurality, autoethnography, performative ethnography, Trujillo-Colombia
This dissertation is based on the author's fieldwork and life experience in the coffee-growing area of Trujillo, Valle del Cauca, Colombia. It meditates on the lives of people who, at some point in time and in specific classification circuits, are named as persons with disabilities. The dissertation aims to mobilize the concepts of navigation and embodiment to understand the lived experience of peasants and their families who embrace disability in this community. It argues that disability not only affects an individual and isolates him or her but serves as an amalgam that unites family members and neighbours. As the author of this paper is himself one of the research subjects, it also seeks to reflect on the notion of autoethnography and the presence of the other interlocutors as co-producers of the dissertation. Through photography, archival images and the "photographic self-portrait", the "performance" of disability and its potential to explore other meanings and uses of rurality, objects, houses, the organization of spaces and the sociability of bodies with disabilities in Rural Landscapes is addressed.