August 17, 2020 (http://somatosphere.

net/2020/covid-disability-work-
accessibility.html/)

Science,

What the experience of Covid-19 Medicine, and

Anthropology

tells us about disability, work, and A collaborative website

covering the intersections of

accessibility
medical anthropology,
science and technology
studies, cultural psychiatry,

(http://somatosphere.net/2020/covid- psychology and bioethics.

disability-work-accessibility.html/)
By Bernardo Oliveira (http://somatosphere.net/author/bernardo-oliveira/), Daniela
Navarini (http://somatosphere.net/author/daniela-navarini/) and Valéria Aydos
(http://somatosphere.net/author/valeria-aydos/)

This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic

(http://somatosphere.net/series/dispatches-from-the-pandemic/)

The ‘new normality’ in the world of work:

Bernardo, one of the authors of this piece, has Larsen’s Syndrome, a rare
genetic disease. Because of this, he has difficulty traveling long distances and
needs accommodations. He says that on the first day of work on January 2020,
in an effort to find the classroom where he would teach courses on
Anthropology and Disability, his back “stuck,” immobilizing him for two days.
When he requested accommodations from his university, administrators
denied his original requests. The only possibility of working would be
reducing classes and preparing extra-class activities for students. In other
words, ‘remote work’ had not been a possibility of ‘reasonable
accommodation’ offered to Bernardo so that he could carry out his activity
without hindrance to the quality of his work. Ironically, after the outbreak of
COVID-19, the university communicated that “until the end of the semester,
all courses should be offered remotely.” It is worth mentioning that
universities expect all students to pay full tuition for remote learning
(meaning they are “valuing” it the same as in-person teaching).

Anahí is a deaf person and, her main request during in-person academic
events is for real-time captioning, which is continually denied due to the high
costs. It is customary, then, to ask people to speak one at a time and not to
place the microphone in front of the mouth, so that she can follow the lines
by lip-reading. Before the pandemic, she was forced to turn down invitations
to online events due to communication difficulties and weak transcription
technologies. Now, however, research group meetings and evaluation
committees have also gone online. She would have been excluded from the
main activities of her academic life if it were not for her concerted effort to
participate with a combination of accessibility resources, such as cochlear
implants, instant transcription, and virtual platform chats. In other situations,
participation necessitates Skype’s automatic captioning function, or the
activation of Zoom’s closed captioning feature, which is done by a
professional in the field. Also, she expresses concern about ‘a world of masks,’
in which one’s hidden lips – already shown on TV news – would deprive her
of communication.

Thiago is a person with low vision who works as a public servant, an activity
he does with accessibility tools at his workplace. Technology adaptations at
his home are not sufficient to carry out his work, mostly due to isolation and
the remote work policies. Additionally, there are no “human resources for
accessibility” available to exercise his profession in equal conditions with
other colleagues at the workplace. Thiago’s right to have a person, who can,
for example, read what the software could not read on the computer screen,
was not taken into account in the ‘diversity management’ of this new reality.

The above accounts led us to several issues that, if they were already present
in the lives of people with disabilities in the world of work, are now ‘wide
open’ to everybody. The social context that emerged during the COVID-19
pandemic begs the following questions: what is really at stake in the social
inclusion of people with disabilities in working environments? How are
accessibility issues being valued and operationalized in the practice of the
world of work?

According to the UN (2006), “people with disabilities are those who have
physical, intellectual or sensory impairments, which, in interaction with
various barriers, can obstruct their full and effective participation in society
with other people.” This conceptualization emphasizes a shift in the
understanding of disability from a natural consequence of a body with injury
(biomedical model) to body diversity in interacting with a socially excluded
society (social model), assuming disability as a relational, social, and political
issue. Advances such as the American Disability Act (ADA) and labor market
quotas in Brazil have been fundamental in combating the ableism encoded in
justifications for not adapting the workplace so employees with disabilities
can work effectively. That also reflects the erroneous perception of disability
as an individual problem to be “adjusted” (or, in most cases, eliminated) and
the non-perception that it is the society that must think about new
management forms for diversity and not for generalization.

This journey of political and social struggle of People with disabilities towards
a conception of inclusion as a movement was not easy at all. In the late 1960’s
social movements like the “Rolling Quads” and activists like Edward Roberts
and John Hessler started to work towards eliminating barriers in scenarios
where some people with disabilities were kept in their homes without any
access to civil rights. They have gradually gained rights and access to spaces
for health and education, such as mental health units, and the integration of
these spaces into broader society, as in the case of resource rooms in regular
schools. Such models – exclusion, segregation, integration, and inclusion –
have been designed to analyze working conditions for people with
disabilities.

New technologies that allow for teleworking have heightened the debate
about the confusion between public and private. Also, the non-regulation of
these duties has generated more exploitation of precarious work, including
more sick workers in areas that had already shifted to this reality prior to
COVID-19, mainly women whose domestic chores and childcare are added to
work obligations.

Under the allegation that the Pandemic situation imposed a nonstop

“necessity,” we are experiencing the transformation of several sectors that
previously did not consider the transition to virtual platforms. As we read in
Bernardo’s account, the business justifications for either not hiring or making
tasks and working hours more flexible for people with disabilities, or that
technology and workers’ skills were lacking, seem to have quickly fallen
apart. Now the “necessity” no longer results in the promotion of accessibility
for inclusion but from not wanting to limit productivity.

The so-called “new normal” of the pandemic has raised the possibility of
producing new social relationships and transforming forms of personal and
work relationships. Now, Bernardo works on equal terms as his colleagues.
Adaptations are quickly made, and new methods are being improved, such as
the adoption of speech transcription technologies for the participation of
people with hearing impairment or deafness in teleconferences, as the ones
used by Anahí.

However, other necessary tools are not being considered, such as “assisted
work” for people like Tiago. Their experiences highlight the prioritization of
capital over people and the inability of public agents and society in general to
meet the specific demands of the population. At the same time, the pandemic
socializes limitations and uncovers our everyday ableism. The daily lives of
people with disabilities are so full of complexities and require immense
individual effort to be carried out so that the person “fits” and then
“integrates” into so-called employability, transforming a process that should
be social into “individual accountability.”

At a deeper level, we must recognize that there are bodies—some considered

disabled, others not—with varied abilities and functions. Society must take
become stake-holders in the struggle to transcend the historical-political
meanings of simplistic binary thoughts—such as disabled / non-disabled and
sick/healthy. Alison Kafer observes in the book Feminist, Queer, Crip that
Crip Theory rejects these dichotomies and claims the crippling of the
“different” theory. To ‘cripple’ practices is to recognize the ethical, epistemic
and political responsibilities of questioning all the preexisting conditions
under which we all live; it is to realize that this crippling also benefits those
who are not interested or invested in this transformation. Perhaps the current
pandemic context stretches the social fabric until it ruptures the standard
ways of life. Perhaps reflecting upon Crip Theory shows us a crooked walk, in
which ableism is no longer the model to be mimicked so that other walkings
are possible and more bodies exposed. Perhaps the pandemic will bring us a
new understanding as radical as the notions of access and inclusion of all.

A Portuguese version of this text was published in the site of ANPOCS

(Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Ciências Sociais). It is
available here (http://anpocs.org/index.php/publicacoes-sp-
2056165036/boletim-cientistas-sociais/2395-boletim-n-67-cientistas-sociais-e-o-
coronavirus. ).

Bernardo Oliveira (oliveira.bernardo@gmail.com) holds a PhD in Anthropology

and is currently a professor at the City College of New York (CCNY), and a
researcher of Group for Studies on Anthropology and Disability of the Federal
University of Rio Grande do Sul (GEAD/UFRGS).

Daniela Navarini (danielan.navarini@gmail.com) is a psychologist, a master’s

student in Social and Institucional Psychology (UFRGS), a member of the N-
Pistas Núcleo de Pesquisas Instituições, Subjetivação e Trabalho em Análise(s),
as well as a researcher of Group for Studies on Anthropology and Disability
(GEAD/UFRGS), in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Valéria Aydos (valeria.aydos@gmail.com) holds a PhD in Social Anthropology
and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Anthropology at UFRGS. She is also a
member of the Brazilian Association of Anthropology (ABA) Committee on
Disability and Accessibility, and researcher at of Group for Studies on
Anthropology and Disability (GEAD/UFRGS), in Porto Alegre Brazil.

Similar Posts

Feminism, disability, and reproductive autonomy: abortion in times of Zika in Brazil

(http://somatosphere.net/2020/abortion-zika.html/)
The Two Singapores: From the Worker's View (http://somatosphere.net/2020/the-two-
singapores-the-workers-view.html/)
Neurological, Structural, and Pandemic Emergencies: Elective Cochlear Implant Surgery
during the COVID-19 Pandemic (http://somatosphere.net/2020/neurological-structural-and-
pandemic-emergencies-elective-cochlear-implant-surgery-during-the-covid-19-
pandemic.html/)
The structural silencing of disabled children and their parents: A reflection on who is absent
in discussions about the toll of coronavirus (http://somatosphere.net/2020/structural-
silencing.html/)
From Quality of Life to Disability Justice: Imagining a Post-Covid Future
(http://somatosphere.net/2020/from-quality-of-life-to-disability-justice.html/)

[view academic citations]