Including people with intellectual disabilities in the mobilities turn: mobile interviews in Toronto,Canada

ABSTRACT

Geographic research about disability and mobility often foregrounds the built environment as a site of in/exclusion. People with intellectual disabilities (IDs) have been mostly absent from this scholarship. To respond to this gap, we draw from an in-depth set of ‘mobile interviews’ with people with IDs in Toronto, Canada. Using a thematic approach, this paper suggests that more-than-material relations matter to the everyday mobilities and immobilities of people with IDs in urban settings. We aim to centre the participants’ experiences and call for greater inclusion of people with IDs in critical-geographic studies of the disability-mobility nexus. We highlight participants’ regular, planned, and spontaneous mobilities; their attitudes towards their own movement, stillness, and ‘stuck-ness’; and their experiences of staring in public spaces. The contingencies of belonging/exclusion, choice/regimen, and fitting/mis-fitting – as well as the more-than-material, varied, and contextual nature of those tensions – are present in many of the participants’ (im)mobilities in and through the city.