By Roberta Esposito*
* Roberta is a PhD researcher in International and European Union Law at the University of Pavia, Italy. Her project centres on the human right to mental health, focusing on the promotion of mental well-being and prevention of mental conditions. She examines this right in relation to both the general population and persons with disabilities, within International Law and EU Law. To refine her research, Roberta has been a visiting PhD researcher at Maynooth University, School of Law and Criminology and Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute, Ireland; and at the University of Groningen, Faculty of Law and Groningen Centre for Health Law (GCHL), The Netherlands
On 19 and 20 June, the closing conference of the five-year research project Protecting the Right to Culture of Persons with Disabilities and Enhancing Cultural Diversity through European Union Law: Exploring New Paths (‘DANCING’,) was held at Maynooth University, Ireland. Funded by the European Research Council (ERC), the project was led by Principal Investigator, Professor Delia Ferri.
DANCING was grounded in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), a treaty that anchors disability rights within the system of legally binding international human rights law. The European Union (EU) is itself a party to the CRPD, which holds a sub-constitutional status within the EU. The project examined how the protection of the right of persons with disabilities to participate in cultural life intersects with and reinforces the promotion of cultural diversity within the European Union’s legal framework. The conference brought together legal and non-legal scholars, policymakers, activists, and artists to discuss the project’s results, as well as the innovative methodology of research used throughout its execution, namely a combination of the classic doctrinal legal method with socio-legal and arts-based methodologies.
As a young researcher in International and European Union law, the DANCING Conference offered me an opportunity to reflect on how research can itself embody the values it aims to uphold, and on the role each of us plays in ensuring that these values are meaningfully realised. At the same time, working in the field of the right to mental health in international law, I was prompted to consider how certain methodological approaches adopted throughout the DANCING project could be beneficial in advancing the right to mental health. Drawing on the main recurring themes that emerged during the final conference, this contribution traces a path from the methodology developed by DANCING to its potential application beyond disability.
DANCING and Method-as-Message: EU knowledge cycle, lived experience and arts
Building on the principle of participation enshrined in the CRPD, DANCING foregrounds the use of socio-legal methodologies, embracing a law-in-context approach. Socio-legal methodologies examine law as a social phenomenon, in contrast to doctrinal legal methods, which concentrate on the analysis of written legal texts and treat law as an abstract and technical phenomenon. They instead emphasise the social relationships that both shape and are shaped by legal texts, as well as their subtexts, that is the moral meanings embedded in both text and context. By adopting this approach, DANCING enables a more comprehensive and enriched understanding of legal issues, drawing on insights from other disciplines or through truly interdisciplinary research.
In particular, the project engaged with members of various EU institutions, conducting interviews with staff from the European Commission, the European Parliament, and other bodies whose work either focuses on or relates to the rights of persons with disabilities. Hence, this approach made it possible to go beyond traditional doctrinal legal research, often referred to as ‘black-letter’ law. In addition, it enabled the incorporation of the study of European institutional practices, many of which are either not grounded in formal legal norms or only partially so. This has contributed to a broader and more grounded understanding of EU law, helping to prevent the risk that “the ‘black letter’ of EU law remains a dead letter without reflecting in its analysis the various practices which EU institutions develop in shaping and implementing the formal legal norms”. It has also supported “the traditional virtuous circle of EU knowledge production”: institutions make, interpret, and apply EU law, while scholars organise and share this knowledge with students, preparing them to become future actors in the same ongoing process.
Moreover, with the aim of valuing the knowledge derived from lived experience, DANCING engaged with organisations of persons with disabilities and with groups working in the field of disability rights and disability arts across Europe. This took the form of dedicated interviews and questionnaires, recognising persons with disabilities as vital contributors to the research. In doing this, and most significantly, as Professor Doherty remarked during the conference, the project has evocatively and provocatively adopted an arts-based approach to academic research. Arts-based research, for the purpose of the DANCING project, is defined as qualitative research that incorporates the principles and practices of the arts. It refers to any form of social research or human inquiry that integrates the core elements of creative arts into its methodology. The arts can be employed at various stages of the research process, including data collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination. Additionally, arts-based research functions as a form of expression, allowing a range of experiences to be conveyed in ways that challenge conventional understandings [and languages], thus reminding us that alternative ways of being are possible.
In essence, DANCING embraced a socio-legal perspective that merges traditional doctrinal legal analysis with arts-based methods, aiming to develop and convey an ‘embodied understanding’ of legal concepts. Such understanding is rooted in bodily experience and its affective dimensions, shedding light on both the significance of legal norms and their realisation in everyday life. Thus, on the whole, DANCING embeds a novel way of conducting legal research by looking beyond the law in many intertwined ways. What renders the project particularly significant, aside from its formal subject matter, is its method-as-message, which emerges vividly as a research approach that not only critically examines its object of study but also embodies the foundational principles upon which it is built and seeks to advance. DANCING places lived experience at the heart of legal inquiry. As Professor Maher and Professor Piernas López observed during the conference, this is a powerful reminder that “law is not a black box” and that this is “how academic research should be”.
The inclusive power of method-as-message in shaping a caring and collaborative academia
Discussing what academic research ought to be, DANCING’s ability to bring together art, disability, and academia has enabled the externalisation of academic knowledge, as noted by James Kelly, Director of the DANCING documentary, during his intervention. It has also fostered the much-needed cross-pollination and collaboration between research on the social determinants of mental health and human rights-based approaches, especially given that DANCING centres on culture, which is itself recognised as one of these key determinants. In addition, we must add the insights shared by Professor Priestley in his keynote dialogue, where he underscored the importance of holding onto the values embodied by DANCING: being inclusive, because tackling exclusion, in any form, requires more than well-crafted arguments. Inclusion must shape how we conduct research, especially when working towards shared goals. At its heart, DANCING has brought to the fore two additional values that resonate across disciplines and practices: collaboration and (the ethic of) care. These values not only inform the content and focus of the project but, more subtly, suggest how research practices themselves can begin to address, albeit on a small scale, the very structural conditions they seek to explore. In this sense, fostering more inclusive academic environments with less adversarial and more constructive forms of competition, grounded in the belief that everyone, in their own way, can find their path and voice, may be understood as a way to model change in line with the social determinants of mental health. Research, then, becomes not only a means of knowledge production, but also a space for enacting the very values it promotes. After all, care is a universal part of the human experience, something we all rely on at different points in our lives.
What if we applied the CRPD lens and method-as-message to mental health?
This method-as-message would be especially valuable in rethinking other areas, such as the right to mental health. While DANCING did not explicitly address this field, it exemplifies a model for developing a more contextual, structural, and participatory research approach, in compliance with the CRPD.
As I posit in my doctoral research, the field of mental health today arguably finds itself in a position similar to that of disability prior to the adoption of the CRPD. Despite numerous political commitments, mental health remains predominantly framed through a clinical, individualised, and pathologising lens, one that isolates psychological suffering from the broader socio-economic conditions in which it arises. This framing not only places the burden of distress on individuals but also obscures the underlying determinants that contribute to mental ill-health. This is even though, according to the interpretation of Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the right to mental health encompasses both the right to the underlying determinants of mental health and the right to access mental health care. Applying the CRPD paradigm to mental health does not mean equating all forms of distress (or mental health issues) with disability. Rather, it involves drawing on the CRPD’s normative and conceptual breakthroughs, namely its emphasis on participation, context, and structural transformation, to challenge deficit-based approaches and promote a more inclusive, rights-based understanding of mental well-being. Just as the CRPD reframed disability as part of human diversity rather than a deviation from the supposed norm, applying its paradigm to mental health enables us to view psychological distress and emotional fragility as natural expressions of human vulnerability and complexity.
By placing lived experience and interdisciplinarity at the centre, DANCING offers inspiration for research on mental health that focuses on the conditions in which persons live and move through the world, and in their broader needs, thus, the underlying determinants.
This reflection also allows us to revisit the work of Franca Ongaro Basaglia, an intellectual who, together with her husband, Franco Basaglia, played a leading role in the cultural revolution that led to the closure of psychiatric asylums in Italy. According to her, the stories of those living with mental illness must be understood as narratives shaped by social class, revealing how an exclusive focus on the clinical aspects of illness, detached from the person’s life before hospitalisation, prevents any genuine understanding of the concrete processes that lead to the illness. Ongaro Basaglia pointed out that if we concentrate solely on the symptom and disregard the person’s story, we risk overlooking their real needs, needs that often manifest through the symptom itself. When these needs remain unmet, they can contribute to the onset or worsening of illness. To truly comprehend mental distress, we must examine its origins, people’s actual lives and conditions. I think that this perspective aligns closely with the approach adopted by Professor Ferri and the DANCING project, which told us many ‘stories’ and placed lived experiences and voices (in all its expressive forms, pursuant to the principle of accessibility) of persons with disabilities at the centre of legal analysis, recognising that law cannot be detached from the context in which individuals exist (or dance). In this light, the notion of ‘embodied understanding’, as adopted in DANCING, may offer a grammar useful for recognising and responding to peoples’ needs, not as abstract rights, but as situated and meaningful claims emerging from every individual life. As Professor Palermo observed in his intervention, every minority group requires concrete means to enable individuals to claim their rights and have their voices acknowledged. DANCING’s method-as-message lies precisely in promoting such participation, offering practical tools and models that can be replicated to ensure wider and more substantive involvement.
So What? So Next? When I left for Maynooth, I had initially planned to write about the role of culture as a determinant of mental health, linking it to the right to mental health for all and for persons with disabilities, which lies at the core of my research. However, after engaging with the speakers and discussants at the conference, and reflecting on the insights that were shared, I realised that the event, and the project itself, conveyed a broader and more resounding insight. Although methods and methodologies play a key role in legal education and research, they have not received the attention they deserve. Young researchers like me eagerly seek dedicated courses for their deeper study, but such courses remain rare. Given that interdisciplinary methods allow us to assess the role and impact of international law in the international community from multiple perspectives, I found it necessary to reconsider the focus of my writing. Based on the reflections shared throughout the conference, it seems fair to say that the method-as-message pioneered by DANCING holds significant potential to inspire new research trajectories, and to open the dance floor to reimagining how academic research can embody a lens of sensitivity through which to interpret and enact values such as inclusion, collaboration, and care, from mental health to other domains. These values are essential if we are to give true resonance to the most vulnerable voices, in full recognition of their rights and their being. Certainly, there is much to take away for my approach to research, my ongoing project, and future directions yet to come.