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With Friends Like These: Clashing vulnerabilities in facilitating meaningful activities through digital means for adults with intellectual disability
Mälardalen University, School of Health, Care and Social Welfare, Health and Welfare. (HAL)ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7131-239x
Department of Social Work, Uppsala University.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-2480-7074
2024 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

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).

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2024.
National Category
Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology)
Research subject
Social Work; Working Life Studies
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:mdh:diva-68186OAI: oai:DiVA.org:mdh-68186DiVA, id: diva2:1889457
Conference
31st Nordic Sociological Association conference. Sociology in a Digital World. August 14-16, Norrköping, Sweden.
Projects
Digital daily activity centres. The digital leap triggered by Covid-19 and its future consequences for individuals with ID
Funder
Forte, Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare, 2021-01880Available from: 2024-08-15 Created: 2024-08-15 Last updated: 2025-01-07Bibliographically approved

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Gäddman Johansson, Richard

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