More‐than‐care: People with intellectual disability and emerging vulnerability during pandemic lockdown

• Published in: Transactions - Institute of British Geographers (1965) 2023-09, Vol.48 (3), p.525-540
• Main Authors: Holstein, Ellen, Wiesel, Ilan, Bigby, Christine, Gleeson, Brendan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: cognitive impairment; Concept formation; coronavirus; COVID-19; emergency response; exclusion; Exploitation; Infrastructure; Intellectual disabilities; Learning disabled people; NDIS; Pandemics; risk; Time; Vulnerability
• ISSN: 0020-2754; 1475-5661
• DOI: 10.1111/tran.12595

This paper offers more‐than‐care as a framework for analysing how vulnerability emerges in the lives of people with intellectual disability beyond relations of care. More‐than‐care detaches vulnerability from the identity category of disability. It provides a framework for conceptualising vulnerability in an unequal, neoliberalising, and ableist world and sheds new light on the ever‐evolving constitution of vulnerability and disability. This intervention breaks with conceptions of vulnerability centred on care needs that leave other circumstances that inform vulnerabilities unexamined. Importantly, the framework shifts responsibility for managing vulnerabilities away from carers alone. The more‐than‐care framework is grounded in socio‐material conceptualisations of disability and advances a tripartite framing of vulnerability. First, it grounds studies of vulnerability in histories of spatially uneven investment in infrastructure and resources that shape how care and other practices can assemble to produce, challenge, and manage vulnerability. Second, it recalibrates dominant conceptions of the temporality of vulnerability to ensure sensitivity to the unpredictability of emergent vulnerabilities. Third, in following a socio‐material conceptualisation of intellectual disability, more‐than‐care expands discussions about agency in the context of vulnerability. These concepts are empirically examined through an analysis of how vulnerability emerges in the lives of four self‐advocates with intellectual disability during Melbourne's first and second COVID‐19 lockdowns. The analysis shows that vulnerability was highly dynamic and unpredictable as it emerged in complex socio‐material assemblages that included care arrangements, embodied experiences and agencies, and past instances of neglect and exploitation. Short This paper offers more‐than‐care as a framework for analysing how vulnerability emerges in the lives of people with intellectual disability beyond relations of care. The framework breaks with conceptions of vulnerability centred on care needs that leave other circumstances that inform vulnerabilities unexamined. Applying the framework to the emergence of vulnerability in the lives of self‐advocates with intellectual disability during Melbourne's COVID‐19 lockdowns showed that vulnerability was highly dynamic and that the self‐advocates actively managed emerging vulnerabilities.