Pandemic Effects: Ableism, Exclusion, and Procedural Bias

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed social organizations and altered children’s worlds. As part of an ongoing longitudinal study of the institutional organization of disabled children’s lives, since March 2020 we have conducted interviews with families in rural and urban communities across Canada (65 families at the time of writing). The narrow focus of governments on the economy, childcare, and schooling does not reflect the scope of experiences of families and disabled children. We describe emerging findings about what the effects of the pandemic closures demonstrate about the social valuing of childhood, disability, and diverse family lives in early childhood education and care. Our research makes the case that ableism, exclusion, and procedural bias are the products of cumulative experiences across institutional sites and that it is critical we understand disabled childhoods more broadly if we are to return to more inclusive early childhood education and care.

Re‐Imagining Inclusion Through the Lens of Disabled Childhoods

“…We do this by first describing, albeit briefly, the pre-pandemic experience of accessing disability services in Canada to set the stage that institutions are embedded within ableist, disablist, and normative constructions of childhood. We then discuss our findings from previous IECSS work (Underwood, Frankel, et al, 2019;Underwood et al, 2021), and illuminate how the concepts of institutional flexibility, fallacy of choice, and safety are understood through the lens of critical disability and disabled children's childhood studies which informs new insights into disability justice in childhood.…”

“…The IECSS project is a longitudinal, institutional ethnography of the ways that families and children are organized around categories of disability. Our previous findings show that exclusions through the pandemic did not account for the complexity of the closure of early childhood service systems for disabled children (Underwood et al, 2021). Rather, how early childhood service systems are structured and how they have responded to the pandemic illuminate existing ableism and other injustices.…”

“…Human complexity and disability are constituted by material, socio-political, socio-cultural, discursive, geopolitical, historical, and other processes (Garland-Thomson, 2013;Goodley et al, 2019). Critical disability studies present alternatives to deficit and medical views, including more affirming ontologies and representations of disability (Douglas, Rice, et al, 2021), intersectional, global, and post-colonial analyses of disability along multiple axes (race, class, gender, sexuality geopolitics, and others (see, for example, Erevelles, 2011;Puar, 2017), interventions in exclusionary policy and practice, and the valuing of disabled childhoods (Underwood et al, 2021).…”

“…Yates and Dickenson (2021, p. 1) state that "underlying social structures and systems mean some groups are more at risk in a pandemic context and are therefore more affected [in all aspects of their health, physical, emotional, social, spiritual] than others." Specifically, our previous findings on pandemicimposed changes to how early childhood service systems organize and deliver services to disabled children demonstrate that institutional responses led to exclusions for many families, while other institutional adaptations to the pandemic demonstrated opportunities for connection and inclusion (Underwood et al, 2021).…”

“…This article uses critical disability studies (e.g., Goodley, 2016) and disabled children's childhood studies (e.g., Curran & Runswick-Cole, 2014) to theorize social inclusion and exclusion for families and disabled children during the Covid-19 pandemic. We present new theoretical insights about social inclusion and exclusion gleaned from previously published work from the Inclusive Early Childhood Service System (IECSS) project, as well as other literature, which underscores how pandemic responses to early childhood education and care services impacted families' access to services and the choices they could make with what was on offer (Underwood, Frankel, et al, 2019;Underwood et al, 2021). We first explore institutional flexibility, which relates to how organizations structure the menu of services for families.…”