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Ethnography examines how fun influences outcomes for intellectually disabled adults in vocational settings, suggesting transformative potential.
In this article, I focus on a vocational and arts center named Udaan in Pune, India that prioritizes the value of fun as its institutional goal to analyze the affordances of fun for intellectually disabled adults. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic research, I examine how special educators at Udaan created a fun ethos for intellectually disabled adults through practices, such as, teasing, going on overnight trips, and organizing music performances. While this fun ethos was classed as gendered and sometimes unsettling, it also created subversive possibilities for intellectually disabled adults, pointing to the multidimensional, complex, and contradictory nature of fun.
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Shruti Vaidya (2026) studied this question.
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