"From stories about living to living the stories": inside and outside the idea of home in a cooperative inquiry with social workers, volunteers and family members of people with intellectual disabilities

"Choosing where to live and with whom" is a right and for people with disabilities, is established by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European (2009) and, in Italy, by Law 112/2016. However, the issue of self-determined living is complex. For people with disabilities in particular, it involves the micro level of individual stories, the meso level of family stories, professional actions and community relations, and the macro level of the culture of social inclusion within society. The exercise of this right, therefore, does not only concern the educational and social planning of paths to independent living, but also requires critical thinking about some of the concepts involved in this right. What does it mean to live? What makes a context a home? How can autonomy and dependence co-exist with a disability condition? How does all this shape relationships? Questioning personal, family and social stories, reflecting on practices and their implicit premises, composing new meanings around words, are ways to illuminate the dynamics of power in relationships, including those of education and care, and to set actions and reflections in motion in a creative and co-evolutionary dance. Stories can change power relations, modify the relationship with knowledge (Fabbri, Munari, 2005) and contribute to the creation of new landscapes and new relational choreographies. Formenti (2017) writes: "Storytelling, before being a research method, is the most common way to make sense of our lives, (...) it involves mind and body, connects us to the world and to others, stimulates reflection. (...) Research begins when stories open up to multiple interpretations and levels of interpretation. Training begins when we decide to make something of it". (pp.8-9). This contribution describes a cooperative inquiry (Heron, 1996) with social workers, volunteers and family members of people with intellectual disabilities involved in independent living project. Thinking by stories (Bateson, Bateson, 1987) becomes a biographical, poetic, imaginative way to activate a process of systemic reflexivity (Rigamonti, Formenti, 2020; Jude, 2018) starting from the relationships between the participants: who am I to you? Who are you for me? What can we do here together? Starting from a research around these questions, living is no longer a theme reduced to the design of specialised services but becomes a story to be written together, a landscape to be lived, a dance to be interpreted, a common political commitment to be acted in the world and with the world (Freire, 1970).