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Conducting participatory action research (PAR) with people with and without intellectual disabilities presents challenges, primarily due to participants' varying verbal expression and reflective thinking abilities, leading to potential power imbalances and unfair outcomes. This study investigates using the arts to address these issues in a residential care setting. We specifically chose to collaborate with an artist who maintained an autonomous artistic practice on the research site. This collaboration, occurring at the intersection of the arts, academia, and the residential care context, presented new opportunities and challenges, and thus demanding extensive 'boundary work.' In this article we address the fieldwork challenges we encountered to deepen the understanding of two interrelated questions: how can the arts stimulate equitable, collaborative moral learning processes between individuals with and without intellectual disabilities? And what kind of boundary work is required to facilitate these processes within the context of residential care for people with intellectual disabilities? This study confirms that the use of the arts can have an emancipatory effect on knowledge production by making abstract questions tangible and offering embodied ways to engage in meaning-making processes. We underscore the moral dimensions of these endeavours. Noticing that embodied reactions depend on others to move beyond the here-and-now, boundary work and a shared problem definition are indispensable. This study stresses that within the context of a residential care setting, boundaries exist not only between the fields of arts and the care organization but also within the care organization itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social inclusion policies often assume that community integration is beneficial for all people with disabilities. Little is known about what actually happens in encounters between people with and without severe intellectual disabilities in the public space. Based on social-constructionist and responsive-phenomenological insights, we performed participant observation, semi-structured interviews and researcher reflexivity to study encounters between Harry (pseudonym), a man with a severe intellectual disability, his neighbours, fellow service-users, support professionals, and the first author. A thinking-with-theory strategy was adopted to interpret and deepen observations and reflections. We argue for more 'experimental-relational spaces of encounter' between people with and without severe intellectual disabilities, wherein the latter put down their verbal and cognitive weaponry. This proved to be more appropriate for spending 'quality time' with Harry then typical satisfactory neighbourhood interactions – often embedded in verbality, habits, routines and rationalizations that do not reflect the existence of people with severe intellectual disabilities. An increasing number of people with severe intellectual disabilities live in homes in a neighbourhood setting. However, in everyday neighbourhood life people with and without severe intellectual disabilities hardly ever encounter each other in a way both of them like. The research shows that this lack of pleasant encounters can be related to powerful rules about how we should interact in the public space in the 21st century. In the neighbourhoods we studied, people without intellectual disabilities are in control of these rules. They prefer verbal and cognitive interactions in the public space. Non-verbal and less cognitive approaches are often seen as inappropriate. The research recommends that people without intellectual disabilities should open up for more fitting ways to communicate with people who cannot speak (for themselves). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]