Everyday activisms: Parental places and emotions of disability activism in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

Traditional accounts of activism are often characterised by staged acts of public resistance that are "'grandiose', 'iconic ', and 'unquestionably meaning-ful'" (Horton & Kraftl, 2009, p. 14). Constructing activism in this way means the experience is out-of-reach to "ordinary" people and the issues, politics, and spaces that inform their daily lives. To understand more about the everyday embodied and emotional geographies of activism, this paper focuses on the disability activism of seven parents in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.Everyday ableism creates the socio-cultural conditions for disability activism. Ableism refers to "ideas, practices, institutions, and social relations that presume able-bodiedness, and by so doing, construct persons with disabilities as marginalized, oppressed, and largely invisible 'others'" (Chouinard, 1997, p. 380). Ableism is part of structural socio-cultural power relations that create spaces fit for supposedly autonomous people with "able" bodies and minds (Gahman, 2017;Goodley & Lawthom, 2019), and it is felt as a profoundly personal and embodied experience (Morrison et al., 2020).