Locked Down, Locked Out, but Locked In? Compounding Crisis and Changing Discourses of Disability in Scotland

Citation

Connon I (2023) Locked Down, Locked Out, but Locked In? Compounding Crisis and Changing Discourses of Disability in Scotland. Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting 2023, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, 28.03.2023-01.04.2023.

Abstract
Drawing on fieldwork in Scotland, this paper explores how recent experiences of extreme weather amongst people with disabilities intersected with the Covid-19 pandemic, rising economic and energy instability, and heightened calls for climate action. Discussing how compounding hardship and calls to action resulted in their own resituating of narratives of extreme weather and a resituating by others within wider public discourses of social injustice, I argue this created a complex conundrum involving both a challenging of long-standing ideas of vulnerability, victimhood, and disability, as well as the imposition of new barriers to expressions of agency in the framing of experiences.