I'm Me: Identity, Representation and Voice with Learning Disabled and Autistic Artists

I’m Me: Exploring Identity, Representation and Voice with Learning Disabled and Autistic Artists investigates how learning disabled and autistic artists create, communicate, and understand identity through theatre, dance, visual art, performance, drawing, comics, and collaborative creative practice. Developed through the inclusive research project I’m Me, which worked with more than 100 learning disabled artists and seven arts organisations across the UK, the book foregrounds learning disabled and autistic artists not as subjects of research, but as knowledge holders whose creative practices offer vital ways of understanding identity, representation, voice, care, access, and social inequality.

Structured through a polyvocal mix of short essays, interviews, easy-read summaries, creative work, performance documentation, doodle books, and visual material, the book challenges conventional academic forms and approaches to research. Rather than separating scholarship from artistic practice, I’m Me positions creative expression itself as a mode of inquiry and knowledge production, demonstrating how learning disabled and autistic artists use artistic practice to explore experiences of ableism, stigma, joy, collaboration, independence, and epistemic injustice.

Through discussions of inclusive research, creative practice, representation, identity, and voice, the book examines how learning disabled and autistic artists negotiate questions of agency, authorship, access, care, collaboration, and visibility within cultural and institutional structures that have historically marginalised disabled people’s knowledge and creativity. At the same time, the study asks broader questions about what research, performance, and artistic development might become when centred around learning disabled and autistic people’s experiences, modes of communication, and creative methodologies.

Combining rigorous critical reflection with accessible, multi-modal, and artist-centred forms of presentation, I’m Me offers a major contribution to disability arts, performance studies, inclusive research, creative methodologies, and critical disability studies. The book will be essential reading for scholars, artists, students, educators, community practitioners, and readers interested in accessibility, artistic collaboration, and new approaches to research and creative practice.