Experiences of everyday hate and hate crime in the lives of disabled people: meaning-making, impressions, and resistance

This aim of this research was to explore the different ways that disabled people come to understand, negotiate and resist their experiences of ‘everyday hate.’ In doing so, this work has moved away from narrow conceptualisations of hate crime, and raised awareness of the diverse ways that hate can be experienced and felt within everyday life. Drawing upon Sara Ahmed’s ‘circulation of hate,’ this analysis shows how hate moves within different spaces and becomes ‘stuck’ upon other bodies. The research employs a geographical analysis of hate in order to recognise the different spaces that hate occurs within, and thus better understand how disabled people feel when occupying these spaces. Such an approach argues that experiences of hate shape the way that disabled people think about themselves and their sense of belonging within the spaces around them. As a result, the research shares a diversity of ways that disabled people can come to negotiate these spaces. This includes strategies of avoidance, making sense of, and re-making identity, and enduring additional emotional and physical labour. Moving beyond this, this research contributes more affirmative understandings of hate crime, by sharing the diverse ways that disabled people actively navigate and resist experiences of hate within their everyday lives. Such an approach recognises disabled people as developing a unique understanding of being within the social world. To further harness this knowledge, this thesis poses questions about the role of future research and the potential for greater collaboration with disabled people and their wider communities.