Interstices of Dis/abling Experiences in Times of Crises

Abstract

It is the very lived experiences of crises that draw attention to the situated relations of dis/embodied, spatial, and cultural practices that constitute dis/abling experiences that this Special Issue wishes to address and critically engage with. How are crises lived and experienced by disabled people and how can we learn from the experiences of disabled people in dealing with spatio-culturally situated differences and related specific constraints and requirements in situations of crises? How may these experiences allude to the diversity of embodied life? Understood as precarious interstices, crises experiences not only tell us much about how we live and think by troubling of how we think and live, but they also make us think, hesitate, imagine, and tinker of how we do and may wish to live differently. By unfolding these interstitial experiences, this Special Issue wishes to contribute to the emergence of “publics” (Dewey) which draw attention to the diversity of dis/abling experiences and related modes of existence.

Crises

It is the very lived experiences of crises that draw attention to the situated relations of dis/embodied, spatial, and cultural practices that constitute dis/abling experiences that this Special Issue wishes to address and critically engage with. How are crises lived and experienced by disabled people and how can we learn from the experiences of disabled people in dealing with spatio-culturally situated differences and related specific constraints and requirements in situations of crises? How may these experiences allude to the diversity of embodied life? Crises experiences not only tell us much about how we live and think by troubling of how we think and live, but they also make us think, hesitate, imagine, and tinker of how we do and may wish to live differently.

Crises unwrap the vulnerability of human and nonhuman existence, question and disrupt, endanger and alter life and related modes of societal ordering. Our world is riddled by multiple, self-manufactured crises, epidemics of infectious diseases and pandemics like COVID 19, wars, forced migration, climate change, pollution, hunger crises, endangered species crises, Brexit, finance-, energy-, health care-, cost of living-crises and many more; a painfully long list of crises which have not been solved by those who contributed to them. Mediated by different socio-cultural practices, crises are intensive spaces/times that affect our modes of existence, how we feel, think, and live (Frosh & Georgiou, 2022). While some crises dominate our awareness and related activities to counter them, others become forgotten, are made more or less invisible, or even denied (Roitman, 2013).

Crises experiences unsettle people, their routines, their choices, their understandings, how they engage with others, and how they experience themselves and their environment. Crises experiences often polarize people: Friends become enemies and enemies become friends as alliances in fighting the crises and in addressing those who are meant to be responsible for the crises. Crises affect people, trigger emotional reactions, and create heated discussions and disputes about the causes and effects of the crises. Mediated by the digital, opinions and standpoints grow, solidify, change, get imitated and circulate, multiply and clash; truths and untruths flourish and mix, as do over- and underreactions.

As the German sociologist Ulrich Beck has shown so vividly, contemporary modern crises are the unforeseen consequences of ongoing, techno-scientifically mediated modernisation which put into question the very configurations of modernisation itself; modern institutions produce unintended, adverse side-effects for which these institutions have no remedies at hand, but produce and distribute uncertainties, insecurities, conflicts, risks, and catastrophes (Beck, 1992). Crises are challenging routinized, institutionalized forms of ordering social relations, interrogating cultural practices, putting into question the modernist assumption that the risks of techno-mediated transformation are insurable, controllable, manageable, calculable, foreseeable, and understandable (Beck, 1992; Latour, 2017). But we also know that crises can be understood as central functional agents for reflecting upon given socio-cultural practices and societal orderings, which in turn may lead to significant transformations (Lombardo & Sabetta, 2020). As events, crises affect ambiguous, unintended relations by which the production of goods may turn into bads, wealth for all into wealth for a few and austerity for many, as well as distribution and production of bads into goods (Beck, 2015).

In effect, the lived experiences of dis/abilities may also draw attention to the opportunities that arise from the reflections of how living with crises may offer insights into the “unique ways in which disability leads to the evolution of alternative life styles, creative negotiations, and modes of existence that may go otherwise unrecognized” (Mitchell & Snyder, 2015, p. 29). It may unravel possible scenarios for a post-crises life that contribute to inclusive and enabling practices. At the same time, it may also visualize the diversity of nonnormative everyday practices that disrupt the normativities of ableism which are increasingly infected both by the logics of “neo-liberal inclusionism” as a mode of ableism that “tends to reify the value of normative modes of being developed with respect to ablebodiedness, rationality, and heteronormativity” and effaces the diversity of “peripheral embodiments” and “the active transformation of life that the alternative corporealities of disability creatively entail” (Mitchell & Snyder, 2015, p. 2).

To engage with the dis/abling effects of “crises” in our current epoch as self-manufactured, we need to be careful and avoid to establish a clear division between crises as belonging to the human world and crises as merely natural occurrences. It is precisely the very experience of crises like climate change or COVID 19 that questions the modernist assumption that self-manufactured realities are mere human, namely, cultural accomplishments that are clearly and distinctively separated from crises as they may occur in “nature” (Schillmeier, 2011, 2020). Rather, crises experiences like COVID 19, which turned out to become the main concern of this special issue (but not exclusively), unfold the eventful continuity of nature and culture, affecting what we are or are not capable of by linking the human and nonhuman worlds in new and highly specific ways.

In a globalizing world, crises are vulnerable to become global events as well. Climate change or Covid 19 are just two contemporary examples that document for all of us what it means to live with a global event that unfolds its local specificities of embodied living conditions that disrupt, question, alter, or endanger taken for granted ways of shared lived, convivial spaces between humans as well as between humans and nonhuman worlds. To be sure, global crises always have situated and local effects, produce losers and winners, risks and chances, disable and/or enable; crises shape our memories and how we imagine our futures. Crises like climate change and COVID 19 engender new global actors (e.g., viruses, vaccines, climate, pollutants), which configure the requirements of a novel “political ecology” of human and nonhuman actors, that disrupt not only the logic of modernist human exceptionalism, but also unsettle human ableism.

Although global crises may affect everyone, it is obvious that people who are disabled, marginalized, discriminated, vulnerable, ill, and/or live through precarious situations are at high risk to become more disabled, more discriminated, more vulnerable or ill, and precarity deepens and spreads. Tom Shakespeare et al. (2021) speaks of the “triple jeopardy” Covid 19 has unleashed for disabled people and dramatically draws attention on institutional limits and failures due to the lack of “response-ability” (Donna Haraway) of institutionalized practices, which in turn contributed to “the increased risk of poor outcomes from the disease itself, reduced access to routine health care and rehabilitation, and the adverse social impacts of efforts to mitigate the pandemic” (Shakespeare et al., 2021, p. 1331). Physical distancing, quarantining, self-isolation, wearing masks, and other hygiene practices of protection have impactful and highly diverse and disputed effects on dis/abling spaces and cultures and how they are experienced.

Interstices and Publics

Experiencing a crisis means to be affected by the close relation between the risk of an expected catastrophe and the occurrence of the catastrophe. Crises unfold demanding, conflicted and transformative spaces—interstices—by which the survival of the crisis and the possibilities of how to survive are insecure and uncertain, but vital to continue living, to create relations of the “possible.” Unlike the “probable” which tries to understand the future along a present that extends into future, the logic of the possible, as Didier Debaise and Isabelle Stengers have argued, “makes important the possible eruption of other way[s] of feeling, thinking, acting, which can only be envisaged in the form of an insistence, undermining the authority of the present as regards the definition of the future” (Debaise & Stengers, 2017, p. 18). To be sure, interstices as spaces of “socializing of the new” (Debaise & Stengers, 2017, p. 18) are always at risk to become vulnerable to poisonous oppositions which impoverish interstices. As Stengers (2011) has argued,

Everything we know, and can do, seeks to be become an environment for something possible, which is not ours, but whose eventual “socialization” depends entirely on “us,” on the environment we constitute for it: a culture of interstices. (. . .) What belongs properly to human societies is the question raised by its interstices, at the risk that some social answers to this question may turn against their culture, for instance (. . .) when freedom is set against determination, good against evil, order against disorder, subversive purity against recuperation. (pp. 327/8).

Crises provoke disruptive and ambiguous interstitial times and spaces of socialization in which health and illness, life and death, risk and catastrophe, friendship and enmity may take a hold in rather unpredictable ways. Crises interstices dramatize the very infectious character of interstitial time/spaces in the different ways we affect and are affected by our environment: Infection enables both “the destruction as much as (. . .) the metamorphoses” (Debaise, 2013, p. 118) of living societies, including humans and human societies. Being in crises, humans become extremely uncertain, insecure, hesitant, contingent about how to feel, live, act, how to relate with the environment, of how to socialize with others, if and how to keep routines, if and how to affect changes; at the same time, the dependency on the environment, on others, becomes vital in the different ways the crises effects affect us, are experienced, of how they unfold enabling or disabling realities, offer shelter or put people at risk, make them feel connected or isolated, increase or decrease, enable or disable to make a difference, contribute or threaten what it means to live well in the conduct of everyday life affordances.

Which role, which function may a Special Issue of Space and Culture carry out in situations of global crisis? I suggest that this Special Issue may actively contribute to a “culture of interstices” in the way it presents (in all its limitedness) the multiple experiences of how enabling and disabling effects get a hold in situations of crisis. The special issue wishes to unravel how the experiences of dis/abling effects for humans co-become with their environment. Hence, the question this Special Issue wishes to address is how empirical crises investigations of social science-led research may create interstitial spaces that wish to get a hold of the (lived) crises experiences and how they affect the specificities of dis/abling relations. Rather than providing “knowledge itself,” this special issue as interstice is understood as a way “of making discoveries of phenomena having social import and understanding their meaning” (Dewey, 1946, p. 221), which contribute in approaching dis/abling crisis experiences which are reigned by precarious and fragile processes and practices that configure dis/abling spaces and cultures in time of crises.

Clearly, the readership of academic publications—in print and online—is limited and the current competition of publication on crises is high. Still, the hope is that this special issue may contribute—along with others—to the emergence of “publics” (Dewey, 1946). Following Dewey, publics may emerge where societal realities unfold issues and problems which society’s institutions have contributed to but can’t solve or are inimical to. As Walter Lippmann states, “At certain junctures, problems arise. It is only with the crisis of some of these problems that public opinion is concerned. And its object in dealing with a crisis is to allay that crisis” (Lippmann 1927/2002, p. 56). And he further stresses that “[t]he hardest problems are problems which institutions cannot handle. They are the public’s problems” (Lippmann 1927/2002, p. 121). In that sense, the interstitial space this special issue evokes is also politically motivated. It wishes to “counter-infect” ¹ experiences of crises along social scientific research activities that engage with and bring together the diverse (lived) crises experiences of disabled people. In the case of dis/abling experiences of crises effects, publics may bring together all those who share a specific concern for what it means to experience being and becoming dis/abled. To be sure, the shared concern does not address a homogeneous group or positions, but aims at including all perspectives that contribute to the dis/abling experiences in times of crises. Obviously, this special issue cannot offer a “full picture,” but gives voice primarily to the experiences of crises as they became apparent by the disabled people themselves.

The Depth and Elasticity of Experience

As John Dewey has argued, experience should not be conflated with a mere subjective, human practice. Rather, experience is how things relate in specific ways. These relations are experiences. Relating to our bodies, relations unfold how relations can be experienced. Such a double-folded understanding of experience is crucial for engaging both with crises and dis/ability, since as relational effects, crises and dis/ability, are for themselves experiences that are lived in highly specific ways as experiences. Experiences, then, are not just human or cultural affairs that makes us differ from the “substances” of nature, but draw attention of how we are connected and affected by experiences, human and nonhuman. When it comes to experience, we humans not only share with anyone and anything else the relational effect of being experience, but we also add experience in the specific ways of how our embodied existence experiences our relational being and becoming with others—human and nonhuman alike. Experience as understood here, and as current crises experiences make us aware of, is much more than mere conscious experience; it is the affective, embodied relation between things—human and nonhuman alike.

Thus, experience as employed here, names a “double barrelled” (James, 2003) reality, “in that it recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality” (Dewey, 1929, p. 8). It is worth quoting John Dewey in length:

Experience is of as well as in nature. It is not experience which is experienced, but nature—stones, plants, animals, diseases, health, temperature, electricity, and so on. Things interacting in certain ways are experience; they are what is experienced. Linked in certain other ways with another natural object—the human organism—they are how things are experienced as well. Experience thus reaches down into nature; it has depth. It also has breadth and to an indefinitely elastic extent. It stretches. That stretch constitutes inference (. . .) Like its congeners, life and history, it includes what men do and suffer, what they strive for, love, believe and endure, and also how men act and are acted upon, the ways in which they do and suffer, desire and enjoy, see, believe, imagine in short, processes of experiencing. “Experience” denotes the planted field, the sowed seeds, the reaped harvests, the changes of night and day, spring and autumn, wet and dry, heat and cold, that are observed, feared, longed for; it also denotes the one who plants and reaps, who works and rejoices, hopes, fears, plans, invokes magic or chemistry to aid him, who is downcast or triumphant. (Dewey, 1929, pp. 4a, 1, 8)

If we understand experience of as well as well as in nature, we are able not only to disrupt the modernist idea that bifurcates nature from the human mind (Whitehead, 1920/1964), the subjective projections onto a mindless nature (“psychic additions,” cf. Debaise, 2017), but also the similar logic that projects societally induced disabilities onto the impaired body (“social additions”). Experience as of and in nature allows “the sense of value, of importance, and of purpose (. . .) to be found everywhere, from the most elementary forms of life of microorganisms to reflexive consciousness” (Debaise, 2017, p. 2). To address the dis/abling experiences in times of crises, then, draws attention to disability and ability as experience and how abilities and disabilities are experienced in situations of crises. With the experiences of crises, we become aware of the eventfulness of experiencing of as well as in nature. In effect, the nature of dis/ability experience is not a given fact but the changing realities of how things are related and how these relations are experienced through embodied, eventful relations, what these experiences make important, what bodies are capable of (or not), and how they may or may not do so.

Accordingly, if we consider the nature of dis/ability experience “as consisting of events rather substances,” then dis/ability can be “characterized by histories, that is, by continuity of change proceeding from beginnings to endings” (Dewey, 1929, p. V). Thus, even if we refer to chronic, lifelong conditions, we should not essentialize disabilities, but on the contrary, unfold the multiple histories as changing experiences and how they are experienced. Clearly, as Dewey (1929) stated, “Owing to the presence of uncertain and precarious factors in these histories, attainment of ends, of goods, is unstable and evanescent.” The more so if we look at the relation between crises experience and disability. We may argue that crises experiences are highly affective relations that unfold the risk-laden, precarious, and unforeseeable movement from beginning to ends, from ends to beginnings that narrate dis/abling experiences as experiences of fragile transformation that enable or disable, that add to qualities of living or create barriers, or even threatening life itself. Crises experiences tremble precariously and affectively between beginnings and endings, endings and beginnings that narrate the eventful histories, the sequential ordering of an “affair of affairs, wherein each one, no matter how linked up it may be with others, has its own quality” (Dewey, 1929, p. 97) that reflect the complex “causality” of transformation—for better or worse. In other words, along crisis experiences, embodied social relations that link human and nonhuman experiences quiver between endings and beginnings and are reassembled in rather uncertain, precarious, and unforeseeable ways.

Self-Manufactured Crises

More than 170 years ago, Marx and Engels (1848/1969) have argued in the Communist Manifesto that the self-manufactured crises of modern capitalism unleash infectious processes of production which unravel consequences which cannot be dealt with properly by capitalism and its institutions which brought them into being in the first place. Quite on the contrary, in their reading of nineteenth capitalist production, capitalist crisis management will only worsen the situation by further producing self-destructive effects. For Marx and Engels, the constant transformations and changes are the signature of the “politics” of capitalism which is only successful as long as it does not allow for an alternative to capitalism itself. It is precisely the experiences of crises as the unintended side-effects of the power of “capitalism without alternative” which turn its strengths—crisis by crisis—into its biggest weakness: By establishing a self-referential political economy of competition of the same it undermines the possibility of politicizing “the spellbinding order” of capitalistic rationality to deal with its consequences.

It is worth to quote Marx and Engels (1848, p. 17) in length here:

It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. (. . .) The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians.

As Marx and Engels (1848/1969) have put it so succinctly, capitalism “is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells,” which will ultimately bring capitalism to an end by those who suffered the most from living with the consequences of the multiplication and deepening of unfolding crises. With the techno-mediated industrialisation of productivity, not only will oppression increase, but powerful laborers that were meant to do nothing but strengthening the system, turn into paupers that need to be fed. Moreover, coming together in masses to work, the workers will resist the isolating tactics of competition by associating instead, sharing a concern for their oppressed lives and unbearable lived experiences, which only allows for one possibility: to destroy and overcome the oppressive “system without alternative.” Thus, the very competitive agents of techno-mediated capitalist mass-production and transformation, the individual workers, are enabled to resist competition by associating with each other and become a collective which shares a concern that Marx and Engels attribute metamorphotic agency by which the very basics of capitalist relations are altered, erased.

As it turned out though, the unintended consequences of social change—which made Marx and Engels’ line of argumentation so powerful by showing how the strengths and wealth of undisputed productivity of capitalism will ultimately turn into its greatest weakness and destruction—did not stop to have effects on Marx and Engels’ evaluation of the fate of capitalism facing its ends and new beginnings. The metamorphosis of capitalism into communism, with the organized workers as their prime agents and sole representatives, did not happen. Rather, by integrating the working class they contributed to stabilize capitalism instead, which gained strength through the self-provoked crises. In that sense Marx and Engels’ critique of political economy proved to be weak by suggesting that capitalism will metamorphize, but it proved to be strong in outlining “the way in which the economy was transformed into a politics that kills politics, that gives itself the authority of a rationality that demands unanimity” (Pignarre & Stengers, 2011, p. 15).

In his introduction to the 1946 reprint of “The Public and its Problems” (originally written in 1927), Dewey argues that Marx “theoretical question” of the 19th century that engages with the economization of social organization became a pressing “practical problem”:

The position that economics is the sole conditioning factor of political organization, together with the position that all phases and aspects of social life, science, art, education and all the agencies of public communication included, are determined by the type of economy that prevails is identical with that type of life to which the name “totalitarian” justly applies. Given the view that there is but one form of economic organization that properly fulfills social conditions, and that one country of all the peoples of the earth has attained that state in an adequate degree, there is in existence an outstanding and overshadowing practical problem. (Dewey, 1946, p. 54)

Rather than metamorphizing, Marx and Engels’ capitalism turned into globally spreading, greedy neoliberal economies that manage to frame “all aspects of existence in economic terms, (. . .) quietly undoing basic elements of democracy” (Brown, 2017, p. 17). The liveliness of a globalizing neoliberal infectious system, that

does not merely privatize—turn over to the market for individual production and consumption—what was formerly publicly supported and valued. Rather, it formulates everything, everywhere, in terms of capital investment and appreciation, including and especially humans themselves. (Brown, 2017, 176)

The practical problem—amplified in current interrelated crises—is more real and troubling than ever when neoliberal living just becomes too costly—economically, socially, environmentally. Still, we witness the incredible power of neoliberal practices to cannibalize their self-manufactured crises effects to secure and strengthen its existence. In neoliberal times, crises sell well (Chatzidakis & Littler, 2022; Cubitt, 2022; Klein, 2008). In effect, neoliberalism not only weakens any form of politicizing the capitalist mode of production itself, but becomes its own self-sufficient politics that either leaves the denouncers of capitalism angry but powerless, or spreads the seeds of resignation by growing the need that we have to accept the neoliberal pandemic—for the better or worse (Pignarre & Stengers, 2011).

Neoliberalism frames how the consequences of crises are dealt with by “continuously reorganizing its functioning, in such a way as to disempower any possibility of action that might find a reference point outside of the system and its logic” (Pignarre & Stengers, 2011, p. 27). Hence, it can be argued without big efforts that the crises which affect not only us humans but also our nonhuman environment since Marx and Engels’ times can be understood (at least partially) as self-manufactured by the political economy of capitalist and neoliberal thought and practice. Moreover, the very consequences of self-manufactured crises are increasingly exposed to and configured by the same pervasive logic which exacerbates the crises of modern institutions which lack the methods, techniques, resources, and remedies to adequately deal with their self-created problems.

Still, as we can witness today, neoliberal politics is more powerful than ever. Two strategies—next to many others—seem to make neoliberal strategies so powerful and enduring. And as we will see, both may gain considerable power in understanding dis/abling experiences in times of crises. First, the neoliberal logic re-naturalizes crises experiences. Neither is life seen any more as a pre-stabilized harmony [harmonia mundi] nor are crises self-manufactured. Rather life itself is crises and requires crises management for which the biopolitics of the neoliberal system provides adapting paraphernalia of ideas and materials, techniques and technologies to address, cope, live, and survive the crises of life. These are often highly short-term, random solutions and involve constant reforms, reorganizations, new approaches, novel practices, new markets to keep them profitable. ² So why denying the nature of life as crises if one can profit from it—infinitely and naturally, so to speak? So why clinging to the idea of progress, if providing crisis adaptations are more profitable and more natural? Only by naturalizing the recurrent event of crises experiences—life as crisis management—the neoliberal regime is able not only to black box its all-too-costly and short-term logic, but secures to gain profit, stability, and power from it.

Second, neoliberalism has to engage with the problem that institutions produce consequences for which these institutions lack knowledge, materials, techniques, and technologies to adequately address them. The central strategy is to extitutionalise social problems and address them as common problems of every single human. Thus, although institutionally produced, possible crises effects are translated into problems of all of us and it is up to us deal with them. Societal crises experiences turn into my crises experiences and name the final triumph of neoliberal “culture of personalisation” (Celia Lury). In effect, institutional problems become individual, personal ones, for which the neoliberal logic creates a market where institutions compete with their knowledge, materials, techniques, and technologies to adapt to the personal needs and obligations(!) of crises management.

Crises sell well and become more profitable the more crisis experiences can be naturalized as personal needs that need a market of personalized solutions. Within such a logic, embodied “deficiencies,” the “deviances” from the norm that we all may experience throughout life (living in crises or not) also requires neoliberal expertise and mobilization. Neoliberal biopolitics “proliferates pathologies as opportunities for new product dissemination opportunities” (Snyder & Mitchell, 2015, p. 40). Snyder and Mitchell (2015, pp. 45, 220) point out,

Whereas liberalism recognized some bodies as normatively capacitated for a competitive labor market and other bodies as nonproductive due to their incapacitation (their defining, in-built impairment effects), neoliberalism tends to produce all bodies as languishing through excessive demands of productivity, exacerbated social anxieties, and excessive exposures to toxic environments in order to exploit new treatment markets. (. . .) [N]eoliberal economies produce disability at “home” and “abroad” with alarming frequency. As a result, market economies increasingly reference them among their most prolific target audiences. (. . .) The imperfect is becoming a standard formula of reference for alternative late liberal marketplace profit extraction.

Disability experience, which is exposed to and heavily framed by the individualizing effects of biomedical and techno-scientific discourses and expertise, becomes even more individualized along the hegemony of economic reasoning that increasingly shapes biomedicine, science and technology, and thoroughly structures the social interaction and capabilities of disabled people. Infected by the global neoliberal cultures of economically driven personalized ableism, we witness the precarious enactment of the body-normal as productive, competitive, mobile, and abled (Goodley, 2014). Clearly, neoliberal inclusionism “allows for the embrace of some forms of difference through making them unapparent,” “more normative,” iterating the standards and types of normalcy that enact the prerequisites of neoliberal functioning (Snyder & Mitchell, 2015, p. 4). At the same time, it situates dis/abled people “as veritable canaries in the coal mine of arbitrary, restrictive, and narrowly define government-funded policy initiatives” (Snyder & Mitchell, 2015, p. 38).

Only by the double process of naturalizing life as (the creativity of) crisis management and crisis experience as personalized experiences, neoliberalism is able to black box its de-socializing effects of impoverishing the realities of embodied, social lives. Moreover, as Snyder and Mitchell (2015, p. 4) have argued, neoliberal inclusionism “offers few spaces from which to ‘recognize (our)selves outside of the values, needs, and desires preferred by the market’” (Disposable Youth xiv). Rather, it often dismisses lived relations of different experiences of life and underlines the institutionalized limits and enmity toward the diversity of nonnormative corporealities.

Following John Dewey, we may say that neoliberalism as personalized ableism can be understood as an ongoing impoverishment of life, rather than an enrichment as the logic of economically driven competition wishes to suggest. “Life,” so Dewey (1946), “has been impoverished, not by a predominance of “society” in general over individuality, but by a domination of one form of association, (. . .), over other actual and possible forms” (p. 213), which in the case of neoliberalism presupposes and enacts life as “personal,” “individual,” namely, “non-social,” naturally imperfectly equipped with what “life as crises management” requires. It thereby naturalizes not only crises as experience, but also crises as individual experiences of imperfection that need a competitive environment (a thriving market) to overcome these “natural” imperfections and achieve equal opportunities necessary to play the neoliberal ableist game of competition, recognition, and functioning. In effect, it naturalizes and individualizes disability in need of a culture of inclusivism, black-boxing the precarious and socially lossy [verlustreichen] consequences of neoliberal modernisation.

To summarize, neoliberal inclusivism provides a myriad of “personalised” offerings to overcome the experiences of lacking ideas and sufferings of imperfect bodies, techniques, and technologies. It is as natural to accept life as a permanent crisis by which everyone may be or become disabled, as it becomes natural to accept neoliberalism as the sole expert for issues of monadic, market-driven life. The enacted “naturalisation” of crises goes hand in hand with naturalizing our imperfections and disabilities for which the neoliberal system has the coping tools of overcoming which secures more profits, thereby stabilizing and enhancing neoliberal power. Neoliberalism translates self-inflicted institutional problems and crises into individual ones for which “personalised” solutions are provided. Societally manufactured and embodied disability experience becomes “my disability” that obligates and forces the imperfect individual to join the market of inclusivism. By doing so, neoliberal strategies have “resulted in the incapacity to recognize disability as a site of alternative value and as a potentially disruptive force within neoliberal regimes of toleration” (Snyder & Mitchell, 2015, p. 37).

Making Diversity Matter and the Politics of Interstices

This Special Issue offers a space to narrate the different experiences of spaces and cultures of dis/ability in times of self-manufactured crises. It is up to us not only to narrate the different mediations and experiences of crises, but to reflect upon those, make them public to initiate “the test of a political creation of questions” which tinker with diverse and situated “calling[s] for the possibility of another world without, however, being able to define the path that would lead there” (Stengers & Pignarre, 2011, p. 14). It thereby wishes to multiply the perceptions, understandings, and dis/abling embodiments of diversity as they become apparent through crises experiences. To do so, this Special Issue wishes to contribute to a “culture of interstice” that bring to the fore the crises experiences of dis/ability as a mode of “imagining the value of alternative lives, particularly lives that exist at the fraught intersections of marginalized lives” that underline “why disabled lives matter and how we might revise, reinvent, and transform narrow normative practices, beliefs, and qualifications of who counts” (Snyder & Mitchell, 2015, p. 5, 6).

Global crises like ours demand the work of social scientists to care for these highly situated interstitial times and spaces in which social realities are disrupted, questioned, altered, or endangered, and how new assemblages of the social emerge as an effect of how crises experiences are lived, addressed, imagined, and thought. We need to unfold interstices of scientific inquiries that provide the possibility of global publics that share the concern for dis/abling practices by multiplying and celebrating differences of experience. As Dewey has argued, such publics “consist[s] of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (Dewey, 1946, p. 69). The problem that needs to be addressed in forms of publics is of how to think politics that allows rather than kills politics, of how to make a difference with differences that emerge beyond the logic of market inclusionism, which thins out the productive contrasts and alternatives of nonnormative embodiments and practices.

Publics, as suggested in this article, are always about a shared, particular concern along which diverse and conflicting experiences associate and thereby testify for the importance of specific societal issues made and in the making. That said, interstitial spaces of publics remain ambiguous, challenging, and disruptive times and spaces. Understood as interstitial space/times, publics may bring to the fore the dis/abling crises experiences in all their ambiguities and multiplicity as experiences that emerge from relations with others (human and nonhuman alike) and how these relations are experienced as embodied relations of dis/ability.

Hence, the focus on crises experiences draws attention to the precarity of emerging realities under conditions of crises and related enabling and disabling effects, and how these realities are experienced as embodied relations. Thus, such an understanding brings to the fore how societal and institutionalized modes of relating produce dis/abling worlds, but it also allows to address dis/abling experiences “by tearing them away from the fields of expertise they were confined” (Stengers & Pignarre, 2011, p. 15), away from institutionalized and taken for granted forms of biomedical expertise and abstract disability policies, away from a capitalist-lead, consensus-driven political agenda, away from market-driven infections of neoliberal inclusionism, toward becoming sensitive to the diversity of embodied human experiences and modes of existing.

Social research of cultures of interstices may contribute to the emergence of concerned publics that “draw us together and divide us at the same time” (Stengers & Pignarre, 2011, p. 14), and thereby engender the productivity of contrasts in the making that are at risk of becoming imperceptible from the dangers of mobilizing poisonous oppositions and infernal alternatives that are major lures of neoliberal crises experiences. Inquiring the interstitial spaces that may contribute to emergence of publics that address and think with the dis/abling crises experiences are no wasteland of oppositional social strife of neoliberal modes of market-oriented inclusivism, but techniques of socialization (with) novel modes of living to which the different dis/abling experiences allude. Making these dis/abling experiences public can be understood as a societal mode of protecting “these interstices as environments with which we may address what we may become capable of,” of what it could mean to feel well “to be alive in a new world” (Stengers, 2011, p. 328). What else can we trust in and hope for in times of global and existential crises?