Valuable buildings, disabled people: Tinkering with maintenance and care in situations of socio-material oppression
Abstract
In residential institutions for people identified as dependent on other peoples' support, maintenance and care are inextricably interwoven. The asylums' buildings need constant upkeep and to get necessary resources, they also need people to live in them, functioning thus as vacuous spaces drawing in inhabitants supplied by various disability labels.
While providing shelter, they also complicate caring, as their "cultural" or "economic worth" prevents their transformation into places of dignified living. From a perspective of STS, this case presents twofold challenge.
The first arises from difficulties to conceptualize failure. If we truthfully describe the existing modes of ordering maintenance and care, while respecting associated values, how to understand situations where one of these activities stand in a way of the other? Is strict differentiating between care and maintenance, based on valuing humans above non-humans, the only ethical solution? The second challenge consists of using alternative conceptualizations of maintenance and care to explore other, less radical versions of the controversy.
If both processes are described as tinkering, which aspects of human/non-human relationships come into view? If both the buildings and people living in them are seen as fragile and mutable, could the edifices forming the disability Gulag (McBryde Johnson) become allies of disabled-identified? This paper combines strengths of diplomatic ethnography (Latour) and empirical ethics (Mol, Pols) to theorize maintenance (Cállen and Criado, Denis and Pontille) and care (Law, Mol, Moser) in situations of socio-material oppression and to envision more positive relationships between highly valued mutable buildings and disabled and fragile people.