In Ontario, the landscape of aging is shaped by ageist and ableist ideologies that view older disabled adults through the lens of decline and dependency. Much of the current discourse on aging focuses on reforming long-term care (LTC), reinforcing institutional and carceral responses both within policy and academic imagination. This qualitative study takes a different approach by asking participants how care for aging disabled adults can be reimagined beyond institutionalization. Grounded in intersectional feminist, disability justice and abolitionist praxis, and using a critical transformative paradigm, this research employed Appreciative Inquiry across three focus groups with four participants engaged in aging-related research, policy, and advocacy. Findings highlight how participants identified LTC as a site where aging becomes grounds for confinement, severing community ties and undermining collective capacity to care. Participants emphasized the need to return to community as the starting point for care, naming the skills and relationships and abundance already present. Participants called for the abolition of LTC and proposed non-institutional, autonomy-centered alternatives that sustain aging in place. This study complicates the binary between institutions and community care by exploring how community shows up as buffers to soften the harm faced within institutions, as well as how community resists institutions all together. This research argues that imagining futures for aging requires grappling with the full complexity of people’s lives and the intersecting structures that shape them across the life course, including, ageism, ableism, poverty, housing and food insecurity, gender and race-based violence, among others. Ultimately, this research seeks to disrupt dominant academic discourses that center institutional care in their imaginings and illuminate the community-based alternatives that participants and their communities are already actively building in resistance. In doing so, this work invites us to dream beyond confinement, and towards futures sustained by care, justice, and solidarity.
Caitlin L Tizzard (Wed,) studied this question.