The politics of care and confinement: Disabled people's affective lives during COVID‐19

Abstract

AbstractThis paper explores the affective and material impacts of the reconfiguration of caring on disabled people's lives during the pandemic. We draw on a series of focus groups and interviews with a group of nine disabled people with mobility or sensory impairments, many of whom were politically active in the arena of disability rights and independent living. This work forms part of a wider project re‐imagining care practices and policies. We reveal the interplay of emotion, affect and socio‐material conditions in disabled people's pandemic lives and reflect on how pre‐existing diminished care landscapes compounded COVID‐19's impacts. With support services shuttered and people confined at home, many disabled people experienced a renewed dependence on family care or found their care needs reduced to functional tasks undertaken by rota‐filling workers. We document participants' emotional experiences of loss, fear and anger deriving from changes in their one‐to‐one care interactions and arrangements but also wider societal narratives positioning disabled people as both vulnerable to, and carriers of, disease. Drawing together the crisis' affective and material effects, we demonstrate how disabled people politicized their affective experiences of anger and hope through online organizing to challenge the diminution of supports and demand affective justice from the care system.