Tensions and Escapes in Independent Living Infrastructures for People With Disabilities Under COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the structural deficiencies of residential care homes. In this context, living arrangements based on the independent living paradigm emerged as more resilient care infrastructures in terms of preserving life. But what kind of lives have they preserved, and who has decided what forms those lives took? Drawing on an ethnographic study of two care infrastructures for people with physical and intellectual disabilities living independently in Barcelona, the present study illustrates how the pandemic tensioned and unleashed escapes within these two services, revealing them as postinstitutions working under logics of bureaucratization and hospitalization. This in-depth study allows us to delve deeper into the constraints that these postinstitutionalization models present, at the time that explores the possibilities these projects present for continuing to work toward the promotion of self-organization and full participation of people with disabilities in the becoming of their life projects.