"Don't Be a Knucklehead": Moralizing Disability in New Jersey's Pandemic Response and Rhetoric

Brooks, Emily M.

doi:10.18061/dsq.v41i3.8398

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Chronically ill and disabled Americans felt largely unsurprised when initial responses to the Covid-19 pandemic largely took the form of telling people at elevated risk for severe harm from SARS-CoV-2 to "just stay home" (Brooks, 2021). Many saw these patterns readily without formal social science training.…”

Section: Notes On Riskmentioning

confidence: 99%

Same Old New Normal: The Ableist Fallacy of “Post-Pandemic” Work

Nowakowski

2022

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The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has catalyzed long-needed changes in accessibility and flexibility for work tasks. Disabled and chronically ill people have often experienced unprecedented inclusion during this time. As someone who is both disabled and chronically ill, I have experienced this firsthand. My work as a medical educator, public health program evaluator, and community advocate has been more accessible in recent months than at any prior time. As the pandemic escalated in early 2020, people readily embraced a “new normal” that would allow them to sustain their own livelihoods while staying as safe as possible. Yet even as Covid-19 cases increase sharply both locally and nationally with the spread of the Delta virus variant, many abled people from both my institution and others increasingly demand a return to pre-pandemic practices. The “normal” state for which abled individuals ardently long violates the basic human rights of disabled and chronically ill people. This desire for “normalcy” is fueled by false notions of the pandemic being over. It remains preferred by many for the sake of their own comfort—even though sustaining the inclusive approaches to collaboration introduced during the pandemic often requires little effort and offers advantages for abled people as well. This experiential piece describes ableist implications of seeking “post-pandemic” work environments—and how these constitute “generic processes” in the reproduction of ableism—using both oral history from the author and emerging literature from fellow scholars. In response, it recommends inclusive strategies for anti-ableist work collaboration that achieve justice in accessibility while fostering a welcome sense of normalcy for all.

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Section: Notes On Riskmentioning

confidence: 99%

Same Old New Normal: The Ableist Fallacy of “Post-Pandemic” Work

Nowakowski

2022

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“…It has been theorized that illness; yet, above and beyond such preferences, many diseases have been subject to moralization in particular contexts. Diseases like AIDS (Cochran 1999;Nzioka 2000), mental illnesses like depression (Scrutton 2015), and disabilities more generally (Brooks 2021) have been moralized historically and to the present day. A classic example of a habit that has become moralized over time is cigarette smoking.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moralization and Mismoralization in Public Health

Kraaijeveld

Jamrozik

2022

Med Health Care and Philos

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Moralization is a social-psychological process through which morally neutral issues take on moral significance. Often linked to health and disease, moralization may sometimes lead to good outcomes; yet moralization is often detrimental to individuals and to society as a whole. It is therefore important to be able to identify when moralization is inappropriate. In this paper, we offer a systematic normative approach to the evaluation of moralization. We introduce and develop the concept of ‘mismoralization’, which is when moralization is metaethically unjustified. In order to identify mismoralization, we argue that one must engage in metaethical analysis of moralization processes while paying close attention to the relevant facts. We briefly discuss one historical example (tuberculosis) and two contemporary cases related to COVID-19 (infection and vaccination status) that we contend to have been mismoralized in public health. We propose a remedy of de-moralization that begins by identifying mismoralization and that proceeds by neutralizing inapt moral content. De-moralization calls for epistemic and moral humility. It should lead us to pull away from our tendency to moralize—as individuals and as social groups—whenever and wherever moralization is unjustified.

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3Disability Studies

DiLodovico¹

2022

The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

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This review of literature examines the disability-centered experiences of Covid-19 in disability studies scholarship published in 2021. Under such examination, four main points of synthesis emerge as ways to make sense of the first full year of disability studies scholarship in the pandemic. This chapter, then, proceeds in four sections. First, a focus on the primary methods used in the literature under review as forms of sense-making and conversation that radically engage with the present. Second, a consideration of the eruption of disability politics that emerged in the wake of mask-mandates throughout the United States of America. Third, an observation of the spaces throughout the pandemic in which crip culture served, or had the potential to serve, as an epistemology in changing a seemingly unfamiliar global landscape. Lastly, a movement through the calls to action made by and through the scholarship under review.

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"Don't Be a Knucklehead": Moralizing Disability in New Jersey's Pandemic Response and Rhetoric

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Same Old New Normal: The Ableist Fallacy of “Post-Pandemic” Work

Same Old New Normal: The Ableist Fallacy of “Post-Pandemic” Work

Moralization and Mismoralization in Public Health

3Disability Studies

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