Affect, dis/ability and the pandemic.

The pandemic has heightened anxieties, impacted mental health and threatened to create an overwhelming sense of existential dread. We recognise the material ways in which disabled people have been differentially impacted by Covid-19 and make a case for understanding the affective dimensions of the pandemic. We develop a theoretical approach - cutting across medical sociology and critical disability studies - that understands affect as a social, cultural, relational and psychopolitical phenomenon.

Working the edges of Posthuman disability studies: theorising with disabled young people with life-limiting impairments.

This paper is built upon an assumption: that social theory can be generated through a meaningful engagement with a co-researcher group of disabled young people. Our co-researchers are theoretical provocateurs and theorists in their own right who, through their activism and writing, are challenging us to reconsider the meaning of life, death and disability. Their work on our funded Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project has enabled us to consider the promise and potential of humanist and posthuman epistemologies, theories, methodologies, interventions and activisms.