Worlds of care: fathering children with disabilities

Abstract

This thesis, based on fieldwork in North America, explores worlds of disability, both personal and shared, as they are felt and come into being for fathers caring for children with disabilities. I argue that while disability gains meaning from social and cultural context, for parents it is lived as a bodily experience of disruption. The demands of caregiving, then, shake parents from their everyday, habitual worlds, and launch them upon a new subjective trajectory whereupon they struggle to remake a self in the context of care and disability that is biographically coherent. In this thesis, I engage existential themes of creativity, choice, facticity, tension, communication, and morality, an..