Throughout our co-produced project, Life, Death, Disability and the Human: Living Life to the Fullest (ESRC 2017-2020), disabled children and young people living with shortened life expectancies have readily emphasized their human worth, value and desire for the future. They have done so in disabling cultures that routinely deny them opportunity, access and expectation. Perhaps not surprisingly, our conversations with disabled young people – and our interpretation of them – became more complex upon the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic. In this chapter we share co-researchers’ own blog posts and writings on their experiences of living through a pandemic. Importantly, young people’s voices explore the (new) ways in which they have made sense of risk and threat, both from the virus itself, but also from discriminatory emergency policymaking, compromised access to health resources and a general lack of governmental support – all of which has affirmed the disposability of disabled and vulnerable lives in contexts of dis/ableism.
This book centres on questions about being human that are raised by the current pandemic and addresses these through a series of short, accessible, and thought-provoking essays that range across disciplinary boundaries. The COVID-19 crisis poses massive challenges for citizens, businesses, policymakers and professionals around the globe. The pandemic has highlighted the deep divisions and inequalities that already existed, while at the same time opening up new fissures and fractures in society. However, the crisis also presents an opportunity to fundamentally rethink many aspects of social, cultural, and economic life. Three key issues have emerged in this context that are fundamentally concerned with the experience, meaning, and understanding of being human. These are at the core of this collection. Firstly, the marginalization of many groups of people, most notably members of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities, disabled, young, older, and displaced people and how they are de/valued in the response to the virus. Secondly, the role of new scientific knowledge in these processes of inclusion and exclusion. Little attention has so far been paid to the central role of science in shaping our understanding and experience of the pandemic. Thirdly, the remaking and reordering of society as a result of the pandemic and the opening up of new futures for work, the environment, culture, and daily life. Consideration of how we might better make the future are still missing from public discussion of the post-COVID-19 world. In addressing these critical issues this collection makes a valuable contribution to one of the most pressing issues of our time.Cutting across disciplines from science and technology studies to the arts and humanities, this thought-provoking collection engages with key issues of social exclusion, inequality, power and knowledge in the context of COVID-19.The authors use the crisis as a lens to explore the contours of contemporary societies and lay bare the ways in which orthodox conceptions of the human condition can benefit a privileged few.Highlighting the lived experiences of marginalised groups from around the world, this is a boundary spanning critical intervention to ongoing debates about the pandemic. It presents new ways of thinking in public policy, culture and the economy and points the way forward to a more equitable and inclusive human future.This transdisciplinary collection engages with key issues of social exclusion, inequality, power and knowledge in the context of COVID-19 for a more equitable and inclusive human future.