Disability, hostility and everyday geographies of un/safety

Abstract

This paper connects relational theorising within geographies of disability and geographies of fear of violent crime (FOVC) to explore how disabled people navigate fear and experience of hostility in their everyday lives in Ireland. Drawing on a two year qualitative study with people with a range of impairments, we explore the human and non-human components of assemblages -in particular, encounters with others, assistive supports and 'objects' of disability, and the physical environment -that give rise to diverse affectual and sensory geographies of un/safety. Disabled people have multiple understandings of un/safety that are contingent, embodied and CONTACT Claire Edwards

Troubling ambulant research: Disabled people's socio-spatial encounters with urban un/safety and the politics of mobile methods

“…Indeed, findings from our wider study suggest that while issues of safety serve to circumscribe disabled people's everyday geographies and mobilities, people have highly developed routines and spatial strategies to ensure they feel safe and seek to challenge notions of disabled people's vulnerability by creating self-defined ‘safe spaces’ in their localities (Edwards and Maxwell, 2021). This leads us to suggest that any attempts to address disabled people's community safety in the city need to be considered expansively: that is, they should take account of embodied and emotional encounters with specific places, of disabled people's diverse spatial knowledges, and of the ableist structures and attitudes that de-value disabled bodies and perceive them only as vulnerable or out of place.…”

“…Safety is a nebulous concept with diverse meanings for disabled people. As we elucidate in an earlier paper (Edwards and Maxwell, 2021), in the context of policy and/or ‘official’ discourses of disability, safety has often been associated with paternalistic protection from risk. However, disabled people in our study gave meaning to safety in a variety of ways, connecting it with notions of autonomy and independence (of being able to do things by oneself), to feelings of comfort, having trusted others around, and echoing Feldman et al’s (2020) findings of people with ID's im/mobilities, with having a clear spatial routine.…”

“…Safety thus is experienced in and through the body but is also intimately bound up in and produced through social hierarchies, structures, and perceptions about who belongs in city spaces. In the context of disabled people, for example, the legacy of institutionalised living, and association of disability with dependence and vulnerability, continues to perpetuate ideas about disabled people as risky or unsafe subjects in urban public spaces, despite calls for disabled people's rights to accessibility and participation in the community (Edwards and Maxwell, 2021).…”

“…However, understandings of urban safety, the means through which it should be addressed, and the effects this has for diverse groups of urban dwellers are frequently defined around narrow parameters in city development plans and policies (Adams and Ward, 2020; Edwards, 2020). Urban security strategies frequently place prominence on securing public space through technical measures to design out crime, for example, rather than recognising a broader range of spaces (the local neighbourhood, or the home) as sites of un/safety (Brands et al, 2015; Edwards, 2020; Edwards and Maxwell, 2021). Meanwhile, as feminist geographers and sociologists working within the arena of fear of violent crime (FOVC) have highlighted, measures used to delineate places as safe or otherwise – through crime statistics, for example - often bear little relation to city inhabitants’ own feelings about safety in place (Koskela, 1997; Pain, 1997; Seal and O’Neill, 2020).…”

“…In this paper, we address this lacuna by offering a critical reflection on the use of mobile methods in research on disabled people's socio-spatial knowledges and experiences of urban un/safety in Ireland. In particular, we reflect on our use of go-along interviews as part of a wider multi-method qualitative research study which explored how people with a diverse range of impairments perceive and negotiate urban safety in their everyday lives (Edwards and Maxwell, 2021). ‘Go-alongs’ are in depth interview encounters in which researchers and participants move together through places of significance for the participant (Kusenbach, 2003; Parent, 2016; Stiegler, 2021).…”