Tinkering with Care : Digital Tools and the Struggle to Maintain Meaningful Activities for People with Intellectual Disabilities During COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic and the policies introduced to curb its spread exacerbated the vulnerabilities experienced by people with disabilities. Facing laws limiting gatherings and policies closing down services and banning visitors from care and service homes, care providers found themselves needing to find new and alternative ways to engage with and support care users. Seeking to provide adequate care in a partially locked-down society, many care providers turned to digital technologies as means to overcome physical and social distancing. However, while other sectors could rely on digital communication services as imperfect but temporary versions of pre-pandemic activities, the digitization of care and supportive services for people with intellectual disabilities, a highly heterogenous group with various levels of support needs, was not a straightforward process. Instead, it often required a significant portion of experimentation and creativity. In this paper, we explore the ways that care providers’ work with digital technologies during the pandemic involved tinkering with and caring for not only technology but also people, laws, and standards. We draw on participant observation and interviews with frontline care workers, managers, and participants at five day centres organized under regulation by the Swedish Act on Support and Service to Persons with Certain Functional Impairments. In doing so, we show how the turn to digital technology not only transformed the activities offered by the day centres but also relations between care providers and participants as the digitization of care troubled notions of what good care and vulnerability means in a locked-down world.