Care Work in the Camp: An Institutional Ethnography of Care Work in Developmental Services through a Critical Examination of the Problematizations in SIPDDA and QAM

In this Major Research Paper (MRP) I provide an institutional ethnography of care work in developmental services in Ontario through a critical examination of the Services and Supports to Promote the Social Inclusion of Persons with Developmental Disabilities Act (SIPDDA, 2008) and the Act’s Quality Assurance Measures regulation (QAM). In accessing ways of knowing produced by Black and Indigenous history, critical race/ disability/ queer theory, political philosophy and economy, Black and brown anarchist and abolitionist knowledge, Afrofuturism, and autoethnographic narrative, this work is my attempt to affirm the tidal wave of collective rage, grief, resilience, and hope I am swept up in, crashing against the brittle, unimaginative, violent, and deadly landscapes of white supremacy. I use Carol Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach (Bacchi, 2012) as the outline for this MRP. The application of WPR is grounded in the understanding that the ways in which problems are identified reveal specific biases, shaping how we know ourselves and others (Bacchi, 2012). I engage Agamben’s (1998) theory of bare life in conjunction with WPR, to locate carceral sites and categories of political life in the settler state. In my subversion of the epistemological foundations of SIPDDA and QAM – white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal, eugenic, and ableist ways of knowing – I advocate Fritsch’s (2010) envisioning of intercorporeality as a process of abolishing the carceral conditions of care work and caring with people labelled with developmental disabilities.