The inclusive potentials of extraordinary life: Young disabled lives in pandemic times

This chapter elucidates how COVID-19 has affected the everyday lives of children and young people with physical impairments. The chapter challenges one-sided accounts of the pandemic as an inequality-reinforcing event and presents a more ambivalent, surprising, and potentially transformative picture. While a social crisis such as a pandemic is often conceived as a temporary condition demonstrating a sense of loss of balance and control, such a disordered state of being is ‘the normal’ rather than an exception for many disabled children and young people. The analysis reveals how the pandemic has opened new opportunities and ways of participation and inclusion while at the same time not radically altering the everyday lives of disabled children and young people, as social isolation is already a part of their lives as a result of both disablist barriers and impairment effects. The chapter discusses how such insights can form a basis for improving the lived citizenship of disabled children and youth. The analysis is based on empirical contributions from 19 children and young people, including interviews and written texts. Theoretically, the chapter draws on concepts from the literature on lived citizenship and the social-relational model of disability.