For institutional survivors and their younger peers labelled/with intellectual disability, the COVID-19 pandemic and its related lockdowns carry over past experiences under government-directed isolation and mandatory medical interventions. The sudden convergence of past and present necropolitical ableism in labeled persons’ lives colours this crisis, as we—a group of survivors, younger labeled people (who have not lived in institutions), and researcher/allies—attempt to simply stay in touch amid digital divides that cut off our once vibrant, interdependent in-person activities. No longer able to gather, and with limited Internet (or no) access, we resist social abandonment through phone calls. During phone conversations we discuss the affective contours of this time: grief over the past, loss of agency, restrictive rules in group homes, the dynamics of protest, fear sparked by public health orders, and a mix of anxiety and hope about the future. Taking this telephone-based dialogue as evidence of our lives in these times, we present a brief body of collectively written found poetry, a form of poetic inquiry composed of phone call snippets. This piece, coauthored by twenty members of the “DiStory: Disability Then and Now” project in Toronto, Canada, offers a snapshot of coalition-in-process, keeping in touch amid a crisis that threatens our togetherness and—for some more than others—our lives. Following Braidotti, we couch this found poetry in a brief commentary on our slow, in-progress attempt to “co-construct a different platform of becoming” with one another amid a divergence of historical and contemporary inequities.
Articles by Ann Fudge Schormans
Ann Fudge Schormans is a Professor in the School of Social Work at McMaster University. A white, cisgender settler, Dr. Fudge Schormans’ long history of engagement with people labeled/with intellectual disabilities through social work practice and research, combined with ongoing activist work informs her teaching and research. Employing inclusive, co-researcher methodologies and knowledge production, arts-informed methods, and writing with disabled co-researchers current research projects include the DiStory project that is co-developing curriculum materials for post-secondary education with survivors of Ontario’s institutions and younger generations of people labeled/with intellectual disability; Partnering for Change, which attends to the intersection of disability and youth homelessness; Mobilizing Critical Disability Studies (CDS) Scholarship in non-CDS Spaces; and projects focused on intimate citizenship for people labeled/with intellectual disabilities.