Social Lives
Author: Eva Krolla, Research Assistant in the ERC-funded DANCING Project at the School of Law and Criminology and Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute, Maynooth University
The European Research Council (ERC) funded research project ‘Protecting the Right to Culture of Persons with Disabilities and Enhancing Cultural Diversity in EU Law: Exploring New Paths – DANCING’ based at the ALL Institute and the School of Law and Criminology under the lead of Principal Investigator Prof. Delia Ferri marked its halfway point by hosting the DANCING Mid-Term Academic Conference on Monday, 4 September 2023 at Maynooth University.
The DANCING Mid-Term Academic Conference presented some preliminary results of the project to academic peers in European Union (EU) Law, Disability Law and socio-legal studies. With the aim of situating the on-going research within larger scholarly debates, the conference also served the purpose of gathering feedback, positive criticism and input on the remaining research tasks and activities of the DANCING research team.
As such, it was not only an enriching event to attend, but also an opportunity to reflect on what DANCING represents as an interdisciplinary project embedding participatory and arts-based research elements. Thus, this blog post intends to give a snapshot of the day, briefly discuss some of the interim findings and reflect on the challenges and strengths that interdisciplinary research, such as the one carried out in DANCING, brings about.
The DANCING Mid-Term Academic Conference was a one-day long event and as DANCING we were delighted to welcome a number of renowned speakers from abroad and the island of Ireland. Speakers contributed in the form of chairing panels and roundtable discussions, acted as discussants or participants in the roundtables and with engaging, thought-provoking interventions. While the morning session was primarily addressing EU law and legal aspects of the project, the afternoon session highlighted, besides presenting initial findings of Work Packages (WP) 1 and 2, the collaboration with inclusive dance company Stopgap Dance Company. DANCING commissioned Stopgap with the creation of an original dance performance, entitled ‘Lived Fiction’, which serves as case study and is the centrepiece of the arts-based research and will premier in Dublin in April 2024. Prof. Delia Ferri and the DANCING team were honoured to welcome Prof. Gráinne de Búrca (New York University/ European University Institute) as closing keynote speaker of the conference. Prof. de Búrca addressed how the disability rights regime, largely built on the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), has transformed international human rights regimes more generally.
Alongside other speakers, Prof. Deirdre Desmond in her role as Co-Director of the ALL Institute welcomed and addressed the conference detailing the Institute’s mission and ethos of enabling people across their life course to fully participate in society based on a human rights and person-centred approach. Prof. Desmond further pointed to the interdisciplinary nature of DANCING which reflects the interdisciplinary approach of the ALL Institute.
When introducing the DANCING project, Prof. Ferri explained its rationale and the objectives. She also drew attention on how the objectives of the project – exploring barriers and facilitators to cultural participation for persons with disabilities; investigating the intersection of cultural rights of persons with disabilities and cultural diversity in EU law; and ultimately re-theorising cultural diversity as a constitutional principle of the EU – are topical. In fact, participation in culture has been described as an expression of personhood and dignity with the potential to promote fuller enjoyment of human rights as well as embodying and embracing cultural diversity. Article 30 CRPD forms an important bedrock for enabling persons with disabilities to have the opportunity to develop and utilize their creative, artistic and intellectual potential, yet also acts ‘as a tool for the transformation of how cultures think about disabled people’.
The first panel of the conference, entitled ‘Situating EU Disability Law within EU Law Scholarly Debates’, addressed broader questions of ensuring rights of persons with disabilities within the EU legal order and disability law as a stand-alone field of inquiry. Prof. Ferri discussed the evident constitutionalisation dynamics of disability rights and how they are boosted by federal trends in the EU. This concept is well explained in her latest book edited together with Prof. Francesco Palermo and Prof. Giuseppe Martinico entitled ‘Federalism and the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The Implementation of the CRPD in Federal Systems and Its Implications’. DANCING PhD candidate Iryna Tekuchova contributed by sketching the contours of the global reach of EU disability law building on work by, amongst others, Prof. Elaine Fahey and Prof. Frank Schimmelpfennig. The ensuing discussion was a lively exchange between the three invited discussants who suggested adding other perspectives and layers of reflection to the future doctrinal research of the DANCING team.
A key feature of the conference was a discussion of interdisciplinarity in academic research. A dedicated roundtable focused specifically on the role of interdisciplinarity in advancing the state of knowledge in legal research and other disciplines, and gave insight into the benefits and added value as well as the potential shortcomings and challenges of interdisciplinary work. In this roundtable, Prof. Michael Doherty, for instance, pointed out that interdisciplinary research allows presenting results from multiple angles by addressing different (academic) audiences. By utilising different terminologies, frames and concepts yet still considering the same research question, data and findings, the multiplicity of perspectives and positions that can be developed towards one and the same thing, within but also across disciplines, can be illustrated. Especially, legal sciences are inclined to work on the presumption of a singular truth that can be produced by razor-sharp analysis and ‘black letter reading’ of law (legal sources). Interdisciplinary research challenges that presumption and requires opening up the conversation around the meaning and effect of law as well as adopting other complementary methodologies. Dr. Juan Jorge Piernas López called to attention that political science (and other social sciences) can often be beneficial in legal research as they provide for the context besides the content of law producing a more holistic understanding of how law works in practice which is particularly true for EU law which is highly dynamic through its various transpositions into law of Member States.
While speakers agreed that there are inherent methodological challenges, interdisciplinary research is paramount in addressing research questions comprehensively and that ‘productive tension[s]’ provoked by different disciplinary approaches can be harnessed to facilitate breaking through path-dependency supporting ‘democratising knowledge creation’.
In a second roundtable, Prof. Aoife McGrath and Dr. Victoria Durrer besides Prof. Ferri and Stopgap Dance Company’s Executive Producer Sho Shibata similarly addressed questions of knowledge acquisition through arts-based research, in particular through dance, and how different forms of knowledge interact and complement one another. While participating online, Sho Shibata explained that Stopgap were eager to engage in an academic research project because it also broadened and challenged their ways of approaching the creation of a choreography, somewhat echoing points of the earlier roundtable testing presumptions within a given discipline or practice.
On the whole, the conference showed that DANCING is at the forefront of advancing novel approaches to legal research and knowledge by combining empirical, doctrinal and arts-based research and embedding participatory approaches. As such it has the potential to not only analyse sharply the right to culture of persons with disabilities as enshrined in the CRPD, EU law and other national and international instruments, which barriers and facilitators to this right exist and how the EU may contribute to strengthening the right to culture and fostering cultural diversity, but also to enrich and push the boundaries of legal research methodologies. In that regard, the conference was also important in advancing broader debates on interdisciplinarity which is at the core of the ALL Institute.
The DANCING project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme (grant agreement No. 864182).
