Conference Agenda

In this introductory section, I talk about Connor, also known as Laughing Boy, his loves and the ways in which his dreams have come true in his absence. The #JusticeforLB campaign, to gain accountability for his death, generated an extraordinary collective response in which buses and heavy haulage vehicles were named after him, a collective justice quilt was displayed in the People’s History Museum in Manchester, and the play Laughing Boy was performed in his favourite city with the only props, chairs and a London bus.

This context is set alongside the continuing structural and other forms of violence directed at people with learning disabilities in this country and wider. Violences which are documented, curated and published in research, public inquiries, safeguarding and other regulatory processes, and ignored (Ryan 2025). We are left asking how and why this production generated the impact it did when we so callously ignore the everyday harms people with learning disabilities experience. The research community can, further, be part of the problem with a tendency to not reflect on what has come before, to use othering language and concepts, and present findings and recommendations with a certainty that they will lead to the change identified, happening. The Laughing Boy project has led to the research team entering the unfamiliar world of the theatre which has caused us to question our own practices and work.

This paper explores a workshop held with staff from an organisation supporting people with learning disabilities, following their group visit to Laughing Boy at Jermyn Street Theatre. The workshop, facilitated by some members of the research team, used collages as tactile, relational prompts to evoke memories of the play and spark conversation. Collage was chosen for its materiality and layered nature, with images and words overlapping in ways that potentially mirrored the emotional and political complexity of the performance and its aftermath.

Staff participants reflected on their own advocacy and roles, the impact of seeing Connor’s story on stage, and their belief that others “should see this” to confront ongoing injustices. The workshop became a site of shared witnessing, where personal responses met collective calls for change. However, the workshop also surfaced tensions and discomfort within the research team, which has prompted reflection on the ethics of participation.

This paper will share excerpts from the workshop, visual documentation of the collages, and raise questions about how arts-based methods can both illuminate and complicate our understanding of inclusion, impact, and voice. In the spirit of the panel’s commitment to witnessing, this paper provides a moment to sit with discomfort, honour the insights shared, and consider how research itself must be accountable to the people it seeks to represent.

This paper offers personal reflections on the ethical and methodological challenges encountered when interviewing members of the Laughing Boy cast about their experiences of the production and their perceptions of its impact. While we anticipated issues around anonymity, given that both the play and its cast list are in the public arena, we were less prepared for the navigating the relational dynamics that unfolded in practice when interviewing actors about their experiences of portraying real people. The research space became one in which our unfamiliarity with theatre intersected with participants’ expertise, and their relative unfamiliarity of disability intersected with our own lived and professional experience. These intersecting (un)familiarities, created moments of both connection and dissonance, shaping the dynamics of the interviews and subsequent reflections within the research team. We consider how the potential for both respect and disrespect is generated, negotiated and performed within and beyond the interview encounter. Additionally, in revisiting these experiences, our reflections lead to a consideration of the broader implications of what it means for qualitative researchers to work ethically and responsibly when seeking to promote social justice when anonymity of participants cannot be guaranteed.

This paper discusses the interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) of interviews with actors who performed in Laughing Boy. As described above, the study forms part of a wider project exploring how theatre can transform understanding, empathy, and political awareness around learning disability and social justice.

This analysis was distinctive in that the participants were actors reflecting on the experience of embodying someone else’s story, thereby engaging in layered acts of interpretation that blur the boundaries between performance, empathy, and advocacy. Through iterative and interpretative engagement with the data, constructed themes included a deepened sense of responsibility towards representing lived experience ethically; the affective impact of performance as a form of witnessing; and the ways in which theatrical embodiment facilitated shifts in understanding about learning disability, care, and justice.

In reflecting on these findings, the paper considers what it means to analyse interpretations of interpretation and how such work interacts with understandings of the hermeneutic cycle in phenomenological inquiry.