The Rehabilitation Hospital as a “Parenthetical Bubble-Shell”: Adjusting to Disability Within the Covid-19 Crisis

This essay contrasts the experiences of hospitalization and transition from hospital to home of people who have recently acquired a spinal cord injury (SCI) and the health professionals who work with them before and during pandemic-related restrictions. These experiences are analyzed through the theoretical frameworks of liminality and intersectional Critical Disability Studies. Drawing on narrative-ethnographic data collected in Spain, I illustrate that the rehabilitation hospital is conceived as a “parenthetical bubble-shell” the boundedness and permeability of which was radically altered during lockdown. First, I discuss how this transformed the way people with an SCI adjust to new ways of approaching space and time in hospital settings. Second, I explore how lockdown impacted key processes of “discharge preparation.” Third, I argue that the intersection between ability, gender, and social class modulates the extent to which exiting the hospital before and during the pandemic represented an ongoing crisis.