Teenage wheelchair users experience multiple geographies of waiting

Research within interdisciplinary social sciences has recently focused on temporalities of contemporary lived experiences. This paper extends work in this field through exploring plural modes of routine, intense and interconnected everyday experiences of waiting within a national study of teenage wheelchair users in England. We consider ways in which waiting – whether in relation to things, materialities, mobilities or permission – is occasioned and intensified by intersecting ableisms. Through an exploration of teenage wheelchair users’ articulations of waiting, we argue that many important conceptualisations of growing up and lifecourse transitions implicitly centre normative subjectivities. Teenage wheelchair users’ diverse accounts of waiting challenge normative/ableist sub/disciplinary assumptions about growing up and lifecourse transitions. Their accounts demand recognition of, and reckoning with, diverse forms of youthful experiences and temporalities which have too often been absent or marginalised through previous studies and normative ways of working.