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The Work Of Self-Managing Attendant Services: A Reflexive Ethnographic Study, Erika Katzman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In self-managed attendant services, disabled people organize and manage their own personal support services. ‘Self-managers’ take responsibility to recruit, hire, train and manage ‘attendants’ in order to have greater autonomy in attendant services, and in everyday life. Where the tasks associated with self-managing attendant services are often represented as responsibilities, this research begins with the assumption that these activities constitute work. Following critical disability studies and critical feminist scholarship, work is defined broadly as efforts made to organize and manage attendant services within self-managed models. The research presented adopts a reflexive ethnographic methodological approach to explore multiple perspectives on the …