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seven - “Why Would I Go to Hospital if It’s Not Going to Try and Save Me?”: Disabled Young People’s Experiences of the COVID-19 Crisis
- Edited by Paul Martin, University of Sheffield, Stevienna de Saille, University of Sheffield, Kirsty Liddiard, University of Sheffield, Warren Pearce, University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- Being Human during COVID-19
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 13 October 2022
- Print publication:
- 26 April 2022, pp 60-66
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
Throughout our co-produced project, Life, Death, Disability and the Human: Living Life to the Fullest (ESRC 2017– 2020), disabled children and young people living with shortened life expectancies have readily emphasized their human worth, value, and desire for the future. They have done so in disabling cultures that routinely deny them opportunity, access, and expectation. Perhaps not surprisingly, our conversations with disabled young people – and our interpretation of them – became more complex upon the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Suddenly thrown into a moment where all lives became (more) vulnerable – an already-lived reality of many of the young people in our project – it was also a time where cultures of ableism and disablism were made more explicit, and existing inequalities exacerbated. For clarity, we use the terms ‘ableism’ and ‘disablism’ throughout this chapter. Ableism relates to the material, cultural and political privileging of ability, sanity, rationality, physicality and cognition (Braidotti, 2013), while disablism is the resultant oppressive treatment of disabled people (Slater and Liddiard, 2017).
In this chapter we share co-researchers’ own blog posts and writings on their experiences of living through a pandemic. Importantly, young people’s voices explore the (new) ways in which they have made sense of risk and threat, from the virus itself, but also from discriminatory emergency policymaking, compromised access to health resources, and a general lack of governmental support – all of which has affirmed the disposability of disabled and vulnerable lives in contexts of dis/ableism.
“I know full well in this COVID-19 pandemic that my life is not one that will be saved”: managing discourses of human worth
COVID-19 began with early public health messages that only the elderly and those with existing health conditions are most at risk of serious illness or death. Such ontologically violent messages quickly sought to reassure an overwhelmingly anxious public at the expense and distress of some of those considered the most vulnerable. Further, government ministers affirmed herd immunity as an initial key strategy: the concept of allowing publics to be exposed to a virus, in the hope that spreading it among those who are at low risk means that a large part of the population becomes immune.
six - Imperilled Humanities: Locked Down, Locked In and Lockdown Politics During the Pandemic
- Edited by Paul Martin, University of Sheffield, Stevienna de Saille, University of Sheffield, Kirsty Liddiard, University of Sheffield, Warren Pearce, University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- Being Human during COVID-19
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 13 October 2022
- Print publication:
- 26 April 2022, pp 53-59
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
Our contemporary times are marked by human precarity. This precarity is, however, neither shared, universal nor new. We know that Black, disabled and poor people are disproportionately affected by COVID-19. While it is easy to explain this in terms of the unprecedented impacts of COVID-19, we know that Black, disabled and poor people have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic because of years of systemic racism, toxic capitalism and austere underfunding of health, education and social care. These seemingly disposable lives are routinely devalued. How can researchers engage with people who have been further dehumanized by the pandemic? We offer a response to this question in the context of the Black Lives Matters protests of spring 2020, with reference to the global pandemic that has had disproportionate and inequitable impacts, with a specific consideration of the particularly precarious position of disabled, poor and Black people.
Locked down
There is always a danger of reading these tumultuous times as marking a new ground zero of human suffering. Here we are, so a popular narrative tells us, enduring one of the lowest points in human history. But some of us have been here before; times where certain human lives are deemed more worthy than others. Spring 2020. CNN news is playing in the background. We are struck by the public spectacle of the Black Lives Matter protests in the States. It jars with our own solitary reality. Like many around the world, We’re staying-at-home, although stuck-at-home feels like a more authentic description. The films rolling before us indicate that the protestors are masked. Social distancing is seemingly being observed. Organized marches wind their ways down major roads in cities across the US. The protestors are clearly putting themselves at risk of transmission. This is not a criticism. It is a commentary on the insecure positions that the activists are prepared to subject themselves to in the service of collectively challenging systemic racism. They seem to be saying: “At risk of the virus? We’ve been at risk of racism for far longer”.
While we are taken by the strength in numbers of the Black Lives Matter activists, the ubiquity of the ‘Fuck Trump’ banners and the righteous fury on their faces, these displays of dissent contrast so markedly with the current isolation of a number of disabled friends of mine.