Fostering collaborative moral learning in residential care for people with intellectual disabilities: the role of art and boundary work

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.