Title: “Looking for a Needle in the Haystack”: Autism, Motherhood, Resilience in the Context of Cascading COVID-19 Challenges
Stream: Challenging & Preserving: Culture, Inter/Multiculturalism & Language
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
Authors:
Fatma Guzel, University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom
Abstract:
This paper explores the woeful overlapping, competing stressors and resilience among the coexistence of COVID-19 lockdown for a group of marginalised first-generation immigrant Turkish mothers of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the United Kingdom. The data comes from a current project exploring lived experience of available pre-post COVID-19 support for neurodiverse children in mainstream education, narrated by their migrant mothers.
Emphasising the significance of pre-existing and unfolding adaptive capabilities routed in these women among the timeframe of restrictions in access to educational, social, and professional support systems. Their unheard voices rise out from crisis intertwining social-cultural perspectives of resilience. Thematic analysis of empirical material from in-depth interviews highlights the process of creating resilience influencing the interaction among challenges and building resilience within the mothers as the focus of the analysis can be illustrated as ‘once removed’. The major three themes: Firstly, meaning making of their experiences, secondly, the importance of relationships, and thirdly, strategies used by the mothers to strengthen their resilience.
Trying to capture complexities that reveal the process and characteristics of resilience for immigrant Turkish mothers of children with ASD. The paper argues that rather than resilience being on a silver spoon in such difficult times, these mothers are forced to find the needle in the haystack.
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