Paper short abstract

A materio-semiotic analysis of several commons-based experiments in Spain that are seeking to produce DIY prototypes for the self-care of disabled people in the current context of harsh spending cuts, focusing not only on their empowering and promising effects, but also on their many compromises.

Paper long abstract

Self-care policies are becoming widespread in many European countries because of different ethical and market drives. As a consequence, a burgeoning market of self-care devices for older and disabled people has arisen in the past years in countries like Spain. In this paper, I would like to focus on the promising articulation of several experimental and commons-based projects that seek to intervene this trend: DIY and P2P self-care prototypes devised by independent-living 'concerned groups' who embrace such strategies as a way to have a greater control over the materialization of their everyday products, seeking to more accurately convey their needs. I have come across some of these projects as part of my involvement since 2012 in a Barcelona-based activist design collective making low-cost and open technical aids for and by disabled people. Grounding on Callon & Çalışkan's (2009, 2010) materio-semiotic approach to the anthropology of markets, in this paper I would like to analyse ethnographically the promises and compromises for the assemblage of alternative economic agents in these commons-based self-care experiments. Despite their empowerment promises to enable more 'habilitated agencies' (Callon, 2008) -that is, more self-managed and active people through an infrastructure of free/libre, cheap and personalised technical aids-, in this paper I would like to dwell on several of their practical compromises: what I term the economic 'self-cared status' of their craftspeople, having severe 'disabling' effects in a context of harsh Welfare state spending cuts and general lack of funding, and hence limiting their potential.