Experiences and Actions of Mothers of Children with Disabilities in Peripheral Brazil: Microactivism as Resistance to Shrunken Affordances

This thesis aims to explore how the experiences and actions of mothers of children with disabilities in peripheral communities in Brazil challenge the understandings of disability activism. Using a Critical Disability Studies (CDS) framework that combines political/relational conceptions of disability, care and activism with an intersectional lens to expand Arseli Dokumaci’s microactivist affordances (2019, 2020), the study examines how these mothers navigate and respond to intersecting systems of oppression and state neglect within the periphery. The thesis draws on rich qualitative data collected through creative, participatory methods in collaboration with civil society partners, including mothers of children with disabilities and mothers with disabilities in the project design.
An abductive thematic analysis reveals that existing disability activism models, rooted in Western, binary (disabled/non-disabled) frameworks, fail to account for the lived realities of mothers of children with disabilities in the periphery. These mothers experience disability not only through their children's embodied experiences but also through contexts of "shrunken affordances" - systemic limitations shaped by intersecting systems of disability, gender, race, social class and geographic marginalisation. The thesis builds on the works of Dokumaci (2019, 2020, 2023) to develop the concept of microactivism to describe mothers’ everyday actions of resistance, reimagination, and struggle at the individual and community level, and (macro)activism to describe systems-level advocacy rooted in and sustained by microactivist networks of mothers. By conceptualising activism as a continuum shaped by relational, collective, and context-specific experiences, this research offers new insights into how mothers of children with disabilities in marginalised settings redefine what it means to act politically within the disability space.