Struggles for home in an age of neoliberal-ableism: the homing capabilities of physically disabled people in Sydney

<p dir="ltr">The need to create a sense of home is an essential aspect of the human experience. In this age of neoliberal-ableism, the ableist supremacy of the non-impaired body is anchored to neoliberal values of self-sufficiency, self-responsibility, and autonomy. Disabled people, in these circumstances, confront challenges in finding places and spaces in which they feel at home. The settings in which disabled people operate, in fact, are littered with a variety of physical and symbolic barriers that hinder their sense of home. However, disabled people are not passive victims, but engage in struggles for home, either circumventing or dismantling these barriers. My aim in this thesis is to foreground these struggles that have not been adequately examined in research on home and housing. I draw on a combination of in-depth interviews, visual methods and critical policy analysis to investigate the struggles for home of a socio-culturally diverse group of eleven adults with a range of physical impairments living in the Northern and North-Western suburbs of Sydney, Australia. </p><p dir="ltr">To understand disabled people’s homemaking practices, I combine insights from Heidegger’s phenomenological conception of home as <i>dwelling </i>and Sen’s capability approach. As dwelling, Heidegger conceives of home as the intrinsic human capability to structure the unstructured, using personal navigational maps that people develop throughout their lives by being in the world. I refer to this capability as <i>homing</i>, a term borrowed from biology that indicates the ability of some animals - especially pigeons -to always find their own way home, no matter how distant they travel. This term, in fact, conveys the idea that, despite people constantly having to make and remake their homes, the foundations of these homes are held together by a set of bedrock values which stay invariable. I then draw on Sen’s capability approach to grapple with the multiple facets of the homing capability, and to explore how it is lived and practiced in my participants’ personal experiences. </p><p dir="ltr">My analysis shows that disabled people’s struggle for home is inexorably linked to both their struggle for recognition and to their anti-ableist resistance. On the one hand, ableism is tackled by the visceral necessity of people to find their own place in the world, to belong somewhere. On the other hand, the pragmatic necessity of tackling ableism leads people to create new paths of homing and to (re)appropriate their spaces in the world. Following Heidegger, I contend that only when people find their place in the world - which is when they are <i>dwellers </i>- they can also make sense of their houses, transforming them into homes. For this reason, I explore how my participants’ perform home outside of their domestic walls and then look at how they replicate this inside their domestic walls. This framework, prioritising personal values and meanings that people attach to home, allows the thesis to go beyond the focus on accessibility and affordability that seems to prevail in studies on housing and disability. Instead, it frames home as a dynamic site of contestation characterised by complexities, contradictions, and transformative potential.</p>