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This article analyses challenges and opportunities related to the digitisation of daily activities for adults with intellectual disability (ID) using information and communication technology (ICT). An overarching question is whether these experiences can promote digital inclusion for people with ID, in accordance with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The article draws on interviews with 16 service users, nine support persons and 19 staff and managers at five day centres, all of which used digital activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The interviews were analysed using theoretical thematic analysis informed by van Dijk’s (2012) arguments on the diffusion, acceptance, and adoption of new technologies to achieve digital inclusion. During the spring of 2020, many day centres closed due to COVID-19. The introduction of digital activities revealed a lack of access to ICT. Bureaucratic barriers were encountered, such as uncertainty about secure digital platforms and GDPR. Additionally, ICT use could be challenging due to rapid developments, as well as ubiquitous demands for the innovation and improvement of provided activities. Another obstacle was a lack of digital skills and scepticism towards digital activities among staff at the day centres and support persons in the service users’ home environments, which sometimes led to the denial of services. Yet, cooperative ICT usage among staff and support persons was perceived to promote a more holistic approach to service provision. When adequately supported, ICT usage allowed opportunities for personal development and improved self-esteem in persons with ID, as well as individually tailored service provision. The experiences of using ICT during the pandemic increased the day centres’ abilities to overcome physical distance in offering meaningful activities for service users. However, disparities persist, warranting further efforts towards reducing the digital divide affecting people with ID.

This study analyses experiences related to digitization of daily activities for adults with intellectual disability (ID). An overarching question is whether these experiences can promote digital inclusion. During the spring of 2020, many day centres closed due to COVID-19. However, as reports on the deteriorating health of adults with ID isolated in their homes began surfacing, manyday centres pivoted to instead explore possibilities for providing meaningful activities digitally.The study draws on ethnographic data from five day centres for adults with ID in Sweden that all experimented with providing meaningful activities with the aid of information and communication technology (ICT) during the pandemic. Interviews were carried out with 16 service users, 9 carers,and 19 staff and managers. Fieldwork was carried out in each of the five day centres one year after the interviews. The results show that staff were able to provide meaningful activities for adults with ID from a distance using ICT - to some extent. There were many obstacles, but also opportunities. Managers and staff saw new opportunities to provide meaningful activities through digital means, to engage absent service users, and to extend/develop familiar activities digitally. Service users also saw new ways of communicating with family and friends. The research participants expressed positive attitudes towards the future role and increased use of ICT in day centres, but the fieldwork revealed that most new ideas about digitalisation had not been realised. Possible reasons are discussed, including organisational barriers, the role of staff, and the tyranny of tradition

Introduction The ableist rhetoric around sexuality in disability services and beyond can hinder subjective sexual expression and have a powerful impact on health, self-esteem, and everyday life through internalized ableism, structural marginalization, and interpersonal discrimination. The aim of this study was to explore the ableist rhetoric of sexuality and its impacton sexual scripting for people with intellectual disability.

Methods A thematic analysis was carried out on data generated through ethnographic fieldwork at five sheltered accommodations and semi-structured interviews with ten individuals with intellectual disability.

Results The results show that people in Sweden with intellectual disability are desexualized within a moral order that ismaintained in post-institutional social care. Through this moral order, which is deeply embedded in an ableist rhetoric about sexual relationships, sexual scripting for disabled people is constrained both inside post-institutional social care initiatives, and in the broader community of “ableist environments.” In response, disabled people employ various strategies of resistance.

Conclusions A rhetoric of positive sexuality should be a guiding principle for successfully supporting the development of sexual agency on each individual’s own term.

Policy Implications We conclude by encouraging the development of initiatives that will empower and support people with intellectual disability to learn about their sexual rights and to find solutions that allow for development of sexual agencyand subjectivity.

This presentation will address the digitalization of disability services in Sweden, specifically focusing on the uneasy alliance between service users and frontline care workers engaging with and through assistive products and information and communication technology as part of everyday care and service provision. In Sweden, adults with intellectual disability (ID) who are not employed or enrolled as students have a right to support with meaningful activities which are typically organized at or through day centres. As the initial wave of the Covid-19 pandemic hit Sweden in early spring 2020, over one third of local municipal authorities made the decision to abruptly close all day centres to visitors and to suspend their regular activities for an unforeseen period of time (Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare 2021). The presentation draws upon data from a research project on the provision of meaningful activities at day centres for adults with ID during and in the wake of the pandemic, including interviews with service users, frontline care workers, and managers at five day centres. These were day centres which had all transitioned from primarily providing daily activities on-site to instead offering activities partly through various digital means. As part of the presentation, we will illustrate how service users were made vulnerable by the actions of frontline care workers at the day centres and in their home environments, as staff at both sites laboured to find common ground in working with digital technologies as part social situations riddled by risk and uncertainty. Moreover, we will show how day centre staff in turn were made vulnerable by the actions of local municipal authorities, as the former were left fumbling in the dark and experimenting with different ways of facilitating meaningful activities digitally during a time when few knew what was possible, reasonable, or legally permissible to do. The presentation will conclude with comments on the current state of providing meaningful activities to adults with ID through digital technologies and the potential future prospects this has for reducing the digital divide affecting this group (cf. Bryant et al. 2012; Johansson et al. 2021).

The purpose of this dissertation is to develop our understanding of the performance and management of vulnerability in social interaction. The term vulnerability is used frequently within a wide range of scholarly fields, however common conceptions of vulnerability have been criticized for containing normative assumptions about our propensities for being exposed to and capabilities for dealing with adverse events and experiences. Through ethnographic investigations carried out in sheltered accommodations for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Sweden, the dissertation seeks to challenge how scholarship on care and disability has approached matters of vulnerability. 

The analysis shows that vulnerability was performed in two distinct overarching forms: 1) vulnerability related to “situational uncertainty” perceived as a threat to individuals’ health and personal safety and 2) vulnerability related to “ritual automatization” perceived as a threat to individuals’ personal freedom and well-being. The study found that pervasive institutional demands for transparency, accountability, uniformity and self-monitoring were loudly echoed to be the formally sanctioned best course of action for managing vulnerability in the context of sheltered accommodations. However, the analysis suggests that these types of strategies only address vulnerabilities related to situational uncertainty, whereas they may do more to exaggerate vulnerabilities related to ritual automatization. By performing and managing vulnerability, service users and support workers participated in “interaction rituals” with socially stratifying effects based on the individuals’ perceived or assumed competences. 

By considering the positions, relationships, and encounters between service users and support workers who engage on an everyday basis in sheltered accommodations which are conceptualized as “vulnerability-based” and “chimeric” interventions for care and service provision, the dissertation opens new perspectives on the performance and management of vulnerability in social interaction.

In Sweden, professionalization projects in disability care services are currently being undertaken in order to differentiate and establish a professional identity for professionals within care work. The aim of this paper was to analyse the experiences of care workers’ meaning of the professionalization process concerning their occupation and their occupational identity in relation to tasks they perform in front-line contacts with persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities at respite care service homes. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten care workers. The meaning of the professionalization projects is an ongoing process of a connected mission, meaning that the care work is performed in close contact with care receivers and that it takes place within an informal and free framework, predicated on a logic of possessing a particular kind of “care-feeling.”

This paper aims to get a finer understanding of the social interactions between staff members and resident service-users living in housing with special services in Sweden, by looking at the ways they communicate using mobile phones or the Internet. Previous research on disability and technology has focused mainly on issues pertaining to barriers relative to the accessibility of telecommunication technology or to the way disabled people make use of such technology. However, this research has paid little attention to the type of social relationships that are created and facilitated by means of such mediated interactions.

In this paper, we attempt to tackle this issue by answering the Symposium’s invitation to investigate “how connectivity and disconnectivity can give rise to and facilitate social inclusion and democratic processes, as well as exclusion, isolation and conflict.” Drawing upon ethnographical data, we analyse three different situations. First, a situation of (dis)connection initiated by a resident service-user. Second, a situation of (dis)connection initiated by a staff member. Third, the use of e-mail correspondence as both an alternative and a complementary form of communication initiated by a resident service-user. In doing so, we call attention to the fact that interactions imply (dis)connections between various parties and that telecommunication technology adds a layer of complexity to the already blurred lines between private and public spheres in housing with special services.

Background: The concept of ’care’ is contested and has been the object of lively debates. In the field of care research, different conceptions view care as a practice – focusing on the physical and emotional labor preformed disproportionately by women within the family and the public sector – or in terms of an ideal – highlighting care as a species activity and basic human right, stressing our interdependent nature. From the tradition of disability studies the concept of care has commonly been denounced on account of being readily associated with negative perceptions of disabilities. Care was viewed to be rooted in the ‘psychomedical model’, and thus accused of reinforcing the image of disabled people as dependent and passive. Hence, disability research has tended to focus on the social aspects related to disability (the ‘social model’) and leave aside the question of care. However, as in the case of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) the experiences of living with an impairment cannot as easily be disconnected from the needs of care as a strong version of the social model would suggest. Yet, the use of the concept of care in relation to IDD has not systematically been explored. It is therefore this paper proposes that a better understanding of care may be useful for disability research.

Method: The paper presents the preliminary findings of a scoping review of peer-reviewed articles published in English, referring to both care and IDD in either title, abstract or key words.

Results: It is suggested that the link between care and IDD offers an area for debate and convergence between disability researchers and care scholars.

Conclusion: The paper concludes that disability studies and care research, two schools of thought seemingly at odds with each other, may find common ground and opportunities for dialogue on the inherent ambiguities and tensions of care relationships between providers and receives in the area where care and IDD coincide.