Step by Step and all Together? Disability, Disruption and Challenging Narratives of Vulnerability in the Compounding Crisis Context

Citation

Connon I (2023) Step by Step and all Together? Disability, Disruption and Challenging Narratives of Vulnerability in the Compounding Crisis Context. Association of Social Anthropologists 2023 Conference, London, UK, 11.04.2023-14.04.2023.

Abstract
This paper explores how experiences of extreme weather amongst people with disabilities have intersected with experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic, rising economic instability, heightened calls for climate action and increasing activism to prompt disruption of new discourses of human vulnerability and to challenge dominant understandings of compounded crisis Drawing on fieldwork from Scotland, this paper explores how experiences of extreme weather amongst people with disabilities and chronic medical conditions have intersected with their experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic, rising economic and energy instability, heightened calls for climate action, and increasing disability activism to challenge conventional understandings of what constitutes a ‘compounding crisis’ and prompt the disruption and diversification of discourses of human vulnerability and social justice/injustice. In Scotland, increasing hardship has resulted in increasing society-wide concern for human suffering. But, while on one hand, this has led to changing ideas of ‘sympathy’ and ‘deservedness’ within wider public discourses of social justice and injustice, it also has resulted in the continued stereotyping of marginalised groups within a new, emerging dominant discourse of vulnerability, which although aiming to incorporate diversity, actually downplays the full extent of the diversities and complexities associated with the different lived realities of confronting compounding challenges. However, as this paper shows, exploration of the lived experiences of people with disabilities in responding to flooding amidst the pandemic not only helps challenge dominant society-wide conceptualisations of compounding crises as representing a series of discrete events, but shows how increased disability activism within a context characterised by compounded challenges is helping to catalyse a deeper cultural shift that involves the reframing of new emerging discourses of vulnerability and social justice/injustice in ways that are more fully reflective of human agency and which are more appreciative of the diversities and complexities of what experiencing a compounding crisis may entail.