Disability (and) Care in Late-Capitalist Struggle: A Dialectical Analysis of Toronto-based Disability (and) Care Activism
Year: 2017
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Disability organizing has proliferated across North America, particularly in the historic centres of disability organizing: San Francisco and Toronto. Similarly, attention to “care” in its multiple practices and formations has proliferated in community-based and radical activism. This proliferation is linked to the historical developments of austerity, neoliberalism, and imperialism as dominant material and ideological social relations. In this context, the meanings of disability (and) care are being reworked and reconceptualized by the state, grassroots organizers, and a variety of financial interests, proliferating disability identities. These social relations place care (and social reproduction) at the heart of radical and revolutionary organizing. Disability organizers and activists seeking to consciously intervene and change these conditions and social relations must grapple with the disability (and) care of the past as well as possibilities for the future in order to shape their projects from forms of resistance to prefigurative and strategic revolutionary struggle. Drawing on oral stories, zines and blogs of activists and organizers, I use a relational/reflexive method (Gorman 2005) to dialectically investigate how disability activists, anti-poverty organizers and political care workers develop “disability consciousness” as they mediate and politicize the contradictions of their disability care praxis. In my interviews with activists beyond the umbrella of disability politics proper, I broaden the historical and material dialectics of care to include disability consciousness around processes and stigmatized drug use in the context of gentrification and drug wars. By expanding these dialectics I can better attend to the social relations of race, imperialism and finance capitalism that remain marginal in disability politics. This thesis is an investigation of how disability activists, anti-poverty organizers and political care workers develop “revolutionary disability consciousness” through struggle. My analysis will develop dialectical methods for recognizing this struggle, while also charting a path towards a revolutionary future, which is not wistful, but realistic, necessary and already becoming.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Mary Jean Hande
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2805521189