‘Everything is down to the minute’: clock time, crip time and the relational work of self-managing attendant services

Abstract

This article presents a key finding from a reflexive ethnographic study of the work disabled people and their support networks do to organize self-managed attendant services: that disabled ‘self-managers’ and their ‘attendant’ employees perform relational work to increase autonomy in the context of austerity-driven systemic constraints. Through a temporal lens informed by feminist and disability studies perspectives, ‘clock time’ was seen to obscure personal resources of energy, time and skill that self-managers and attendants contribute to the performance of relational work. ‘Crip time’ is explored as an alternative temporal orientation that might meaningfully inform future policy and programme development.

Keywords:

• Attendant services
• direct funding
• direct payments
• relational work
• independent living
• crip time

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) under Grant 752-2015-1938.