Paper short abstract:

Shanghainese deaf and blind persons access medical services through a government-driven volunteer program. The description of experiences shared by both, the users and the project's volunteers, aims to understand how institutional efforts might be parallel to care or go against it.

Paper long abstract:

Chinese deaf and blind persons live in constant crisis to access healthcare, in particular, and care, in general. This is particularly true for elder visually and aurally impaired people who barely appear in urban public spaces or whose socialisation is reduced to relations among themselves. The China Disabled Persons’ Federation (Can Lian, in mandarin) has organised a “bridge” project in which volunteer groups assist disabled persons (mostly, blind and deaf) to provide them with the possibility to visit hospitals and have medical consultations. I am interested in the relationship between the Federation and the subjects of their project. What people are they reaching out to? What are their approach methods? How do the involved parts understand and deliver accessibility and care? The paper is based on over a year of ethnographic work on the entanglements between blind and deaf groups with government and grassroots organisations in Shanghai, China. I offer not only a description of particular encounters in the field but also an invitation to analysis. From what research participants experienced, it seems that sometimes institutional efforts are parallel to care; sometimes they might crash against it.