51 Small City Anchor Institutions • Respondents What has emerged from this project is evidence that everyday care practices should be amplified, even while they reveal an urgent need for structural change. The everyday acts of care we identified in our research include negotiations of need, identity, ability, labor, vulnerability, and agency that are politically important because they complicate our deep cultural/economic esteem for “independence.” In a shift from earlier disability rights movements, which emphasized independence as an antidote for infantilization and institutionalization, our work positions independence as one ingredient among many in a landscape of disability wellbeing. More broadly, collective care allows us to challenge social narratives that idealize competition and individual decision-making, and justify the removal of social safety nets. Care impels us to build a world where limitation is no one’s fault, and collective survival is everyone’s responsibility. In our project, the overlap between our area of research and a communityengaged research method has been generative. For example, mapping sessions that included members of the research team, disabled individuals, their loved ones, and self-identified allies became opportunities for participants to validate each other’s experiences and share knowledge, enacting collective care within the space of the research itself. However, I would like to emphasize that working between disability theory and community-engaged research, I have come away with lessons for each based on how the other has affected my reading of the world. Thinking about disability requires a responsibility to questions that deepen and expand a community-engaged practice. For example: where do I end and the intervention of other people begin? How do we find shared ground, despite differences in how we interpret the world, from within our minds and bodies? How do we continue to center care, when and where our needs conflict? In turn, community-engaged methods ground questions that quickly become abstract, or whose embodied implications might exceed the scope of theory to capture. It is perhaps obvious, but it stands to be stated that opening universities to something like community-engaged research or design is beneficial in multiple directions. Community-engaged methods are not a means to an end, but allow us to see new opportunities and constraints within the modes of working that we have access to. At the same time, community-engagement becomes its own form of knowledge, made richer and more productive by a diversity of disciplines, issues, and participants. CL Bohannon (Associate Professor in the
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