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Paper short abstract

Institutional care in Slovakia traps "disabled" people in maintenance, not progress through minimal resources and division of care, affecting their statehood and personhood. Ethnography together with volunteer experience, explores community based care tensions and change efforts.

Paper long abstract

The individual based, institutional care model, where all the responsibility over a person is put either on close family or entirely on caregivers, creates a reality where the distribution of the care is minimal. In combination with the lack of resources invested in social care, the caregivers are only able to maintain the state of the client, as opposed to advancing it. In some cases, even maintaining the currents state of a person proves to be a difficult ordeal. Hence, also the awareness of options towards a better life is absent or very low. As a result of that, the statehood, as well as personhood are at loss. The desirability of the people labelled as “disabled” is actively being lowered. Community based care, where people labelled as “disabled“ live in smaller communities, in supported housing, seems to be a solution. However, the tension between this model of care and the prevailing institutional care model is ever so present.

Through ethnographic research inside and outside of institutions, working with people labelled as “disabled“ in Slovakia, I would like to explain how these tensions affect the people and what are the efforts of the state, the institutions, and the communities towards a change. My ethnographical research is enriched by my experience as a volunteer in a foundation focused on social inclusion and social rehabilitation of people labelled as “disabled”.