'Everything's the Same, Everything's Halted': Quarantine in a 'Home' for People Identified as Disabled

Abstract

While many evaluations of the response from residential social services to the COVID-19 pandemic have pointed to high mortality rates and human rights violations, some have given a positive assessment of their performance. Whatever the verdict, it is a fact that the clients of residential social services were subject to stricter and longer lockdown measures than the rest of the population. Our ethnographic research describes the lockdown technologies used at Home F, a residential institution for people identified as disabled. Setting out from the assumption that freedom is not the antithesis of some united regulatory regime but is the result of the intersection of various repertoires and logics of influence, the research analyses the ‘passages’ that regulate relations between the clients and their surroundings before and during the pandemic. It shows that the regulatory mechanisms that were put in place to facilitate an effective pandemic response do not constitute a new apparatus but only an intensification of technologies already in place. With the aim of mitigating risk, they delegitimise the needs of clients, render relations dependent on obedience, and pass moralised judgements on behaviour. Such ‘pedagogical arrangements’ cause emotional suffering and do not leave much space for freedom. In the discussion in the article we link our findings to the current debates about the productivity of power and (post)critical pedagogy, concluding that while pedagogy necessarily accompanies the management of risks, a critical gesture that delegitimises the interests and opinions of the objects of pedagogy may not be the most appropriate pedagogical method available. © Sociologický ústav AV ČR, v. v. i., 2022.