As part of the disability dialogues lounge, we led a session on Families, Relationships and Society. The lounge offers a space for critical disability studies scholars to come together around different themes and share their diverse thoughts, experiences and reflections. Our session was framed around three prompts: care, family and intimacy. In this blog, we offer a summary of our collective reflections and discussion points, and how this impacts our thinking as researchers interested in these areas. Before the session began we took time to acknowledge the more challenging aspects of this topic. We also wanted to acknowledge that here, and note that this blog discusses care, family, welfare violence and structural violence more widely.
Our first and guiding core question opened up a key provocation that we returned to throughout: how disability interacts with, and challenges understandings of family, relationships and society, with family in particular being a focus. Family as an institution was questioned for reproducing wider structures of oppression such as ableism and sexism (Lewis, 2022). Considerations were given here to the care expectations placed on women and intersections more broadly with disability and family life. Alongside this were reflections on the role of family as a space ‘away from’ society, and the potential this brings for both affirmative and more challenging interactions. Throughout these reflections was a call for recognising disabled people as family members. Too often disabled people are overlooked, or not centred in discussions about family life. We wanted to place disabled people as siblings, parents, cousins and so on, recognising how disabled people are very much ‘doing family’ (Morgan, 1996) and are active contributors of everyday family life, care and caring.
Conversations were turned to critical questions on care. Given that both authors are engaged in troubling the boundaries between disability politics and dominant care narratives and systems, care felt like a generative place to begin. These questions were:
“Who is expected to care within families - and who is allowed to refuse?”
“How does disability unsettle the idea that care should be reciprocal, balanced?”
The discussion moved through questions of care refusal, violence and management within care systems and relationships, as well as the ways disability and dependency unsettle normative accounts of relationality and interdependence in care theory (Kittay, 2011). We explored how these uneven and often harmful care practices are not accidental, but structured through ableist assumptions about independence, productivity, and self-sufficiency. These assumptions shape who is recognised as a legitimate carer and whose care is taken seriously. From a critical disability studies perspective, care research, policy, and wider narratives frequently presume carers to be non-disabled, autonomous, and capable of giving care without themselves requiring support (Ward, 2011; 2015; Runswick-Cole et al., 2026). Disabled people are instead positioned as passive recipients of care, or as risks to be managed within care systems, rather than as people embedded in complex and ongoing caring relationships.
Our collective discussions stressed the importance of centring the narratives of disabled people who both give and receive care. Here, care emerges not as a neat or reciprocal exchange, but as relational, uneven, and deeply shaped by austerity, welfare surveillance, and institutional withdrawal. We discussed how conditions of care place increasing pressure on families and relationships to absorb care support, while simultaneously denying disabled people the recognition of carer, security in supporting their family members, or the autonomy to choose if someone wants to be a carer, within those arrangements.
Rather than presenting care as a solution to disability inequality or care as a moral ideal, the disability dialogues lounge space asked what becomes possible when dependency is understood as a shared and inevitable condition of social life. In doing so, our collective conversations sought to challenge ableist frameworks that seek to discipline care into forms that are efficient, productive, and emotionally contained, and instead insist on taking messy, ongoing dependency seriously as a political and social reality.
Next, and building on established conversations, we turned to critical provocations on family, asking the question:
How can understandings of family be reimagined through a critical disability studies lens?
Here, we focused our discussion around what critical disability studies can offer scholarship around family, exploring the novel possibilities this approach brings to disciplines that may not always consider disability (Goodley and Runswick-Cole, 2021). We considered the potential to ‘crip’ family practices, with stories of dinner time and holidays being offered that challenged normative expectations. We saw the potential of imagining spaces of inclusion, and resistance, through coming together and the role of family in activism and allyship. Again, time was spent considering how we can centre disabled people in our conceptualisations of family, and the disruptive potential offered in doing so. Normative assumptions of siblinghood for example, such as those around birth order hierarchies, are challenged and rejected when considered through a CDS lens. Davies’ (2023) reflection that we live with the idea of family, alongside our families themselves here was raised in discussion of the role of narratives of being a ‘good’ family member. We reflected on the importance of these expectations in how our family lives are understood by us, and more widely how they can be received in social situations. Again, disability arrived as disruptive, offering new ways of considering familial expectations and, in many ways, rejecting them in favour of different understandings.
We acknowledged the risks of assuming family as an inclusive space: considering the work of Burch (2024) around hate crime, and Lewis’ (2022) call to ‘abolish the family’. These reflections connected closely to our earlier discussions of care, particularly the ways in which harmful care practices can be co-opted, normalised or rendered invisible when framed with familial obligation, or love. Existing disability and feminist scholarship has of course long challenged the idealisation of family, demonstrating how families can function as spaces of discipline, surveillance, and coercion from individual family members but also from state services, systems, particularly for disabled people whose needs disrupt normative expectations of independence, reciprocity, and productivity (Morris, 2001; Shildrick, 2015). Within such contexts, violence may not appear as exceptional or recognisable as abuse, but instead emerges through everyday practices of management, control, and enforced dependency. As scholars note, the privatisation of care within families often shields these harms from scrutiny, rendering them difficult to name, contest, or refuse (Morris, 1997; Herring, 2014). By situating family in these critiques, the discussion resisted romanticised accounts of familial care, and emphasised holistic accounts of family and care practices. This framing allowed us to think critically about how care and intimacy, when routed through family, can reproduce ableist and patriarchal norms through alternate forms of support.
Third and finally, we turned our critical lens to questions of intimacy, guided by the prompt:
“How do ableist ideas about independence shape who is seen as a “good” partner, friend, or family member?”
Intimacy felt like a useful area of focus in the conversation of ‘families, relationships and society’ as it brought attention to the everyday, affective and unspoken norms through which care, family, intimacy and relationships are negotiated. The conversations highlighted how expectations of emotional support, reciprocity and the everyday intimacies are highlighted as exceptional or abnormal when explored with disabled people’s bodyminds. The prompt and our collective reflections helped us to explore how intimacy becomes a key site through which ableist ideals of normative relationships are reproduced. We discussed the intimate expectations about what a ‘good’ relationship should look like. This opened up a space to question how our ideas of emotions, vulnerabilities, dependencies with one another can be critiqued through critical disability studies.
In considering intimacy and family, we touched on the notion of humour as requiring intimate knowledge of one another. This drew on Carter and Davies’ (2024) work around ‘family humour practices’ in which they argue ‘shared humour relies on shared knowledge, including shared appreciation of what counts as transgressive of, or incongruous within, group norms’ (ibid: 4). We put this forward as an example of intimacy that extends beyond that of romantic relationships, and the further how intimacy can play a central role often in how we navigate spaces in our homes and interact with one another. This matters especially when we bring this into conversations with disability and chronic illness experiences, for example.
To conclude, the sessions provided interesting reflections that make clear the potential of critical disability studies to help us to rethink understandings of family, relationships and society. Together, we lent into disruption: using CDS as a driving force for broader exploration into family life, relationships and society. Acknowledging the openness that CDS offers, as captured by Hughes et al’s (2012) reference to ‘theoretical plunder’, we came out with more questions then we had going in, but we feel like the disability dialogue lounge is a space for this.
About the authors:
Charlie is a 3rd year PhD student who focuses on disabled people’s experiences of unpaid care and austerity from a qualitative perspective.
Tom is a research associate interested in family relationships and learning disability, his PhD explored counter-narratives of siblinghood and learning disability.
About Disability Dialogues Lounge:
The Disability Dialogues Lounge is a series of events organised by the Critical Disability Studies Research Cluster in the School of Education. Please contact Lauren White (l.e.white@sheffield.ac.uk) if you want to hear more about the disability dialogues lounge, and the schedule of events for the rest of the year.
References
Burch, L. (2024) ‘“I haven’t got anywhere safe”: disabled people’s experiences of hate and violence within the home’, Social & cultural geography, 25(6), pp. 967–984. doi: 10.1080/14649365.2023.2242325.
Carter, A. and Davies, K. (2024) ‘Laughing through Brexit: Family humour practices, political troubles and everyday life’, Current sociology. doi: 10.1177/00113921241275684.
Davies, K. (2023) Siblings and sociology. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Goodley, D. and Runswick-Cole, K., (2021) What does disability bring to sociology?. Human Figurations, 9(1).
Herring, J., (2014). Relational autonomy and family law. Springer Science & Business Media.
Hughes, B., Goodley, D. and Davis, L. (2012) ‘Conclusion’. In: Goodley, D., Hughes, B. and Davis, L. (eds.), Disability and social theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 308-317.
Kittay, E.F., (2011). The ethics of care, dependence, and disability. Ratio juris, 24(1), pp.49-58.
Lewis, S. (2022) Abolish the family : a manifesto for care and liberation. New York: Verso. Available at: http://link.overdrive.com/?websiteID=360453&titleID=9173704.
Morgan, D. H. J. (1996) Family connections : an introduction to family studies. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge, MA: Polity Press ; Blackwell Publishers.
Morris, J., (2001). Impairment and disability: Constructing an ethics of care that promotes human rights. Hypatia, 16(4), pp.1-16.
Morris, J., (1997). Care of empowerment? A disability rights perspective. Social Policy & Administration, 31(1), pp.54-60.
Runswick-Cole, K., Ryan, S., Smith, M., Ward, M. and Grosset, C., (2026). “Well, I Am Now Looking after This Bloody Rabbit!”: Re-Storying Care in the Lives of People with Learning Disabilities. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 28(1).
Shildrick, M., (2015). XI. Death, debility and disability. Feminism & Psychology, 25(1), pp.155-160.
Ward, N., (2011). Care ethics and carers with learning disabilities: A challenge to dependence and paternalism. Ethics and Social Welfare, 5(2), pp.168-180.
Ward, N., (2015). Reciprocity and mutuality: People with learning disabilities as carers. In Ethics of Care (pp. 165-178). Policy Press.
