Consent-as-Method: Capacity to Consent of Cognitively Disabled People and Research Ethics Review

Abstract

Informed consent is a core ethical principle informing research conduct. Yet, normative consent culture–often grounded in ableist understandings of capacity, rationality, and independence– exclude people with cognitive disabilities. The adjudication of consent capacity in research can be a source of harm, requiring researchers to enact lateral ableism against research participants and, potentially, themselves. As anthropologists conducting ethnographic research with intellectually and developmentally disabled participants in Canada and the U.S., we argue for the creation of an anti-ableist consent culture in the context of research. In exploring alternative ways of doing consent, we turn to the etymology of “feeling-with”–the collaborative, multi-sensory, and embodyminded experience of giving, getting, and living consent–as this can inform more ethical and anti-ableist notions of consent. We propose “consent-as-method” as part of a larger conversation about the methodological challenges and potentials of doing research as and with people with non-normative bodyminds. Drawing on our research and lived experiences of cognitive ableism, we theorize consent practices that consider disabled people's felt knowledges of denial of consent capacity and coercion to inform anti-ableist, relational ways of doing consent. We focus on capacity because it structures the kinds of bodyminds that are seen as capable of being consenting subjects. We build on existing scholarship that considers how critically engaging with disability as a lived experience and orientation fundamentally crips our methodological and ethical commitments. Attending to consent capacity through consent-as-method treats consent as not only a means to an end but as an anti-ableist research ethic.