The Covid-19 pandemic has especially disrupted the lives of people living with chronic illnesses and disabilities and those who care for them. Here, Laura Mauldin examines how the spouses of people living with chronic illnesses and disabilities navigated the care of their loved ones during the pandemic. Through ethnographic research, Mauldin explains how these caregiving spouses took on the brunt of care for their loved ones due to lockdown restrictions and fears of bringing the virus into their homes. The experiences of these patients and their caretakers, Mauldin argues, have been made invisible by both the pandemic and existing policies that do not value caregivers.
Laura Mauldin
Laura Mauldin is a sociologist, disability studies scholar, and associate professor at the University of Connecticut. She is appointed in women’s, gender and sexuality studies and human development and family sciences and holds an affiliation in sociology. Her work examines the role of medicine and technologies in everyday life as they intersect with experiences of disability and caregiving, as well as how ableism creates and maintains inequality for disabled people. She is a nationally certified American Sign Language Interpreter and the author of Made to Hear: Cochlear Implants and Raising Deaf Children (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Her current book project tells the stories of spousal caregivers and their partners. She has been a vising scholar at New York University’s Center for Disability Studies, summer faculty at the Sherwin B. Nuland Summer Institute in Bioethics at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, and is an incoming fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute.