The abject and the vulnerable: the twain shall meet: Reflections on disability in the moral economy

Hughes, Bill

doi:10.1177/0038026119854259

Cited by 12 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…These narratives do not necessarily locate hate crime within broader structures of violence that are present at all stages of the life course for people with learning disabilities (Chakraborti & Garland, 2012, refer also to Chakraborti, 2015). Further, they ignore the histories of exclusion from communities that have located people with learning disabilities as “good to mistreat” (Hughes, 2019).…”

Section: Review Of the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“Because I’ve Got a Learning Disability, They Don’t Take Me Seriously:” Violence, Wellbeing, and Devaluing People With Learning Disabilities

Wiseman

Watson

2021

J Interpers Violence

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For people with learning disabilities, targeted violence has become routinized. In this article, we seek to explore the impact pervasive victimization has on their experience of community and participation and, through this, their health and wellbeing. People with learning disabilities experience significant inequality in health and wellbeing compared to their non-disabled peers, and the role of violence and victimization remains mostly neglected. By drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with people with learning disabilities, we argue that abuse, disrespect and devaluing profoundly erode wellbeing. The complex forms of violence experienced by people with learning disabilities are critical to understanding the significant inequalities in health and wellbeing experienced by people with learning disabilities. We focus on community and misrecognition to move the focus from one that examines causation towards one that uncovers the layers of invisibility, and the complex relations that structure experiences from the perspective of people with learning disabilities themselves. By doing this, we locate violence and victimization as health and wellbeing concerns and seek to add a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of the social determinants of health. For the inequalities that structure the lives of people with learning disabilities to be holistically understood, they must be reframed as an issue of social justice, and violence must be identified as a central contributor to these inequalities.

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Section: Review Of the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“Because I’ve Got a Learning Disability, They Don’t Take Me Seriously:” Violence, Wellbeing, and Devaluing People With Learning Disabilities

Wiseman

Watson

2021

J Interpers Violence

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“…In so doing, I highlight not only the enduring value of classic social theory for making sense of contemporary arrangements, but also how uniting these with a focus on materiality in healthcare/social care contexts provides the foundations for understanding how marginalised groups (older people, in this case) are denied agency, respect and dignity in their everyday lives. I conclude by highlighting how the (mis)treatment of older people is a story of both a deeply inequitable market for care provision (Johnson, 2018, 2022, in press), and a broader context of oppression, devaluation and dehumanisation (Hughes, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dirt, decency and the symbolic boundaries of caregiving in residential homes for older people

Johnson

2022

The Sociological Review

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This article draws upon an ethnography of two differently-priced UK residential care homes for older people. Informed by recent scholarship on the materialities of care, together with separate theoretical contributions by Mary Douglas and Émile Durkheim, I examine the spatial and material organisation of care work. I sketch out care workers’ attitudes and practices concerning hygiene and bodily waste, and how these are established and reaffirmed through the marking out of boundaries between materials, spaces and persons. Central to understanding care workers’ erecting of, or inattention to, these boundaries is an awareness of the material, temporal and cultural conditions of work. Variances in the availability of resources, the formal organisation of work and the layout of residential homes affect the care provided to residents. In examining these variances, I identify how care workers’ use of space functions to maintain or undercut not only hygiene and infection control standards but, also, more interpersonal virtues, such as dignity and respect for older people receiving care. I conclude by highlighting how the (mis)treatment of older people is a story of both a deeply inequitable market for care provision and a broader context of oppression, devaluation and dehumanisation.

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“…For, with this dismantling of collectivity and withdrawal of the state, comes ‘greater expectations for former service users to take up valued lives in the community and occupy positions in the open labour market’ (Power & Hall 2018, p. 305). This position is echoed more widely through a citizenship discourse fixated on economic self-sustainability as a route to increase social inclusion – a person’s value is now measured by their labour-power, which is inherently ableist (Hughes, 2019), and the desire to work is ‘nourished by neoliberal-ableism’ (Bates et al, 2017, p. 163). Moreover, with limited exceptions (Bates et al, 2017; Hall, 2004; Ineson, 2015), there is limited sociological engagement and an absence of questioning the normative assumptions associated with employment for people with intellectual disabilities and, arguably more important, a lack of engagement with the nuanced and complex perspectives provided by the people with intellectual disabilities themselves.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Work aspirations, intellectual disability and ‘cruelling out’ the mark in the job club

Dearing

2021

The Sociological Review

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This article uses ethnographic data to explore the relationship between a job club facilitator and a job seeker with an intellectual disability, to illuminate the gulf between employment activation and the multifaceted everyday reality experienced through employment preparation activities, at a job club established for people with intellectual disabilities who are in receipt of social care. The focus of this article is the micro-interactions apparent within the job club that aligns with Goffman’s ‘cooling the mark’ framework, which is unpacked and extended. The strategies at play here refute the broader, individualised ‘welfare-to-work’ neoliberal rhetoric of employment being available to anyone who works hard enough to attain it. Instead, job seekers are reoriented to accept volunteering roles or dubious unpaid work which are presented as employment-like alternatives. Yet, Goffman’s concept is not static as he envisaged: it fluctuates. For, within this reorientation process, strategies are deployed onto individuals to ensure they are kept interested enough to both accept a lowered employment status, while simultaneously still encouraged to strive for paid work one day. As such, this article teases out the tension and paradox between the clusters of promises attached to work as ‘the good life’ together with everyday disabling experiences of cruel optimism by encouraging job seekers to accept non-normative forms of employment.

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The abject and the vulnerable: the twain shall meet: Reflections on disability in the moral economy

Cited by 12 publications

References 47 publications

“Because I’ve Got a Learning Disability, They Don’t Take Me Seriously:” Violence, Wellbeing, and Devaluing People With Learning Disabilities

“Because I’ve Got a Learning Disability, They Don’t Take Me Seriously:” Violence, Wellbeing, and Devaluing People With Learning Disabilities

Dirt, decency and the symbolic boundaries of caregiving in residential homes for older people

Work aspirations, intellectual disability and ‘cruelling out’ the mark in the job club

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