Disability and chronic illness

Abstract

This chapter discusses the situation of migrants with disability and chronic illness and their access to health, social care and welfare support in settlement countries. The links between disability and migration have been generally neglected in the literature to date; often disability is only referred to as a potential outcome of migration because of the association between poverty, poor health, housing and employment conditions amongst migrants. This chapter provides an overview of key conceptual understandings of disability and chronic illness and the policy context. The links between migration, disability, chronic illness and care support are complex, due to shortfalls in existing knowledge and the lack of policy engagement with asylum seekers and refugees with disability and chronic illness, despite their often high care needs. The chapter pays particular attention to the situation of asylum seekers with disability or chronic illness who often have limited entitlements to health, social care and welfare support, drawing on our empirical research on disability, HIV and caring relations among asylum-seeking and refugee families in the UK. Such families face major barriers in accessing appropriate health, social care and welfare support. The unmet care needs of disabled asylum-seekers also impact on informal family carers, including children and young adults, whose substantial caring responsibilities, combined with their restricted entitlements to support, affect their wellbeing, education and transitions into adulthood.

Let's Get Back to Normal? COVID-19 and the Logic of Cure

“…What does a neoliberal responsibility to cure oneself look like and is it always possible in practice? Discourses linked to fitness, cure and medicine, as well as contestations to genomic identity are not viewed neutrally by disabled people, those with chronic illnesses nor their organizations, who are often critical of technological advances to “cure” all (Hughes, 2009 ) but can also biosocially ascribe to medical identities or impairments due to the hopes of cure (Ottosdottir and Evans, 2016 ; Berghs, 2020 ). Within disability community, alongside such complexities, there have also been longstanding concerns about soft eugenics in screening technologies to prevent disability, the ideology of “ableism” or having to conform to ableist physical norms of health (Campbell, 2009 ), and violence of medical cure and “curative imaginary” in terms of threat to the integrity of the body, “crip time” and disability identity (Kafer, 2013 ; Kim, 2016 ; Clare, 2017 ).…”