In recent years the social and political impact of various global crises has been at the centre of international (educational) discourse around the world. The COVID-19 pandemic represents one of the most noteworthy recent events that had immense effects on social and educational structures, as well as living environments and self-perceptions of individuals. The societal and institutional responses to the crisis often aggravated an existing experience of uncertainty for those already at the margins of society. The project Cov_enable: Re-Imagining vulnerabilities in times of crises, funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF (project P 34641-G), has been researching the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on supported living arrangements and schools in Austria.

One of the main principles for COVID-19 response taken by policy and decision makers focused on the protection of groups assumed to be vulnerable or at-risk. Vulnerability, as a concept, has journeyed through varying terrains of understanding, always shaped by historically and socially contingent conditions. Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds (2014), by offering a foundational understanding of vulnerability, present a taxonomy of vulnerability consisting of inherent and situational/contextual vulnerability – both closely intertwined. Drawing on this foundational taxonomy, Luna (2019) offers a more granular framework for evaluating layers of vulnerability. Central to Luna's conceptualization is the distinction between the origin and manifestation of these vulnerabilities. While some layers remain dormant, others can act as catalysts, either birthing new vulnerabilities or amplifying existing ones.

Employing a qualitative, participatory, and longitudinal approach, the project tracks how concepts and notions of vulnerability move back, forth, in-between and through the macro (policy and media), meso (organizations), and micro (individuals) levels. A central aim of our efforts is to discern how these evolving discourses shape new practices in inclusive education and supported living arrangements. Moreover, it seeks to understand the implications of these practices on the lives of individuals with disabilities and mental illnesses, especially those initially deemed and labelled as particularly vulnerable.

The focus of this paper lies on supported living arrangements that support people with intellectual, psychiatric, physical or sensory impairments in a variety of settings. The paper portrays the entanglements of personal agencies and experiences, processes of subjectivations, institutional structures, and material realities of selected research participants during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The research design employed in the project is framed as a mixed Grounded Theory approach (Johnson & Walsh 2019: 523ff). Throughout the entire research process, basic principles of Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM) such as an iterative and constantly comparative procedure, theoretical sampling, coding and memo-writing have been applied (Clarke 2005; Charmaz 2006; Bryant & Charmaz 2019). In order to follow the experiences of the research participants, two main methods of data generation have been used: in-depth focused interviews (Wieser 2015) and digital audio and video diaries (Bates 2020) as a means of (self-)representation (Greig, Taylor & MacKay 2013; Noer 2014). Data generation at various stages made it possible to capture the experiences of the research participants throughout the course of the pandemic. From January to October 2022 initial interviews have been conducted, where after some participants continued to submit audio and/or video diary entries until August 2022. Additional interviews have been held in June to September 2022 with a final set of interviews in October 2023 to February 2024. A total of 35 voluntary individuals within different supported living arrangements participated in the research, 12 have taken part in the longitudinal component. The data has been examined through different forms and approaches to data analysis. Strategies from Critical Discourse Analysis (Jäger & Jäger 2007) combined with mapping strategies from the Situational Analysis (Clarke 2018) were used to connect multiple perspectives covering structural factors as well as individual forms of agencies (Fairclough 2001, 123). A diffractive reading of the data (Barad 2007; Naraian & Amrhein 2022) enabled the team to illuminate the entanglements of lived experiences, individual perspectives, conceptual frameworks and the societal and material context that has been affected by the pandemic.

The paper follows the experiences and accounts of our research participants in different supported living arrangements, namely congregated supported housing mostly for people with intellectual disabilities, community-based care provision for people with mental health issues, and personal assistance for people with physical impairments. While the organisational settings themselves have been effected by the pandemic (Koenig & Barberi 2023), presenting personal accounts of the participants showcases the various trajectories and uncertainties the participants had to navigate throughout the pandemic. Each case in this analysis uniquely illustrates how individuals with disabilities have ingeniously carved out spaces of meaning, agency, and affordances amidst the tumultuous uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic. These narratives not only highlight their resilience and creativity but also shed light on the ongoing impact of the pandemic in their daily lives. The study underscores a critical need for structural changes in supported living arrangements to foster such resilient agency. This necessitates a shift in policy and institutional approaches, advocating for a model of response-ability that truly listens to, learns from, and collaborates with people with disabilities. By doing so, we can ensure that their lived experiences and innovative coping strategies inform and guide effective crisis response and policy development, both in Europe and globally. As many European welfare states employ similar institutional settings, findings are highly relevant to other national contexts.

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