Disability, chronic illness and COVID-19: Creating criptopias in the wake of a global pandemic

This article aims to consider the COVID-19 pandemic as a unique case study for analysing the relationship between utopia and failure in the context of disabled people's efforts to create COVID-safe communities and spaces. As such it contributes both to literature on disabled people's utopianism and analyses the relationship between utopia and failure from two different angles. Firstly, utopia and its relationship to failure is explored in the sense in which some disabled people have characterised the initial phase of the pandemic as a fundamental utopian shift in how accessibility and inclusion can be understood. Of course, in the UK since then the government's failure to implement effective prevention measures at an early stage of the pandemic has led to COVID-19 becoming fully endemic. Hence, the second sense in which the tension between utopias and failure seems of relevance here is in the context of disabled and clinically vulnerable people establishing their own COVID-safe communities in the absence of effective containment measures during the ongoing endemic phase of COVID-19.