Un-making and re-making boundaries: exploring the socio-material digital lives of young people with an ostomy

• Crip kinships and access intimacies can be made and sustained through digital encounters. • Formalised crip kinship networks are key sites of care and knowledge sharing for many young disabled people. • Young disabled people share and receive embodied knowledge online in ways that shape their social and material lives. • Digital encounters transcend digital space, blurring boundaries between online/offline, digital/material, personal/shared. Drawing on flexible qualitative research with young people (aged 19–33) with an ileostomy or colostomy living in the UK, this paper examines how young disabled and chronically ill people’s digital encounters shape their relational lives, personally, proximately and at a distance. Furthermore, I consider how boundaries – immaterial/material, online/offline, and inside/outside body – are un-made and re-made in and through digital ‘things’, encounters, and relationships. Throughout the paper, I demonstrate the importance of conceptualising people’s digital lives through a socio-material lens, highlighting how young people with an ostomy (also known as a stoma) exchange knowledge about bodily materials and medical ‘things’ online, whilst also attending to the materiality of digital devices themselves. The empirical findings drawn upon throughout the paper evidence the value of crip concepts such as crip kinship and access intimacy. These concepts draw attention to the ways that disabled people connect, collectivise, and care for one another in (in)formal and imaginative ways, often through shared experiences. Overall, this paper contributes to a much-needed discussion within geography on the role of digital space and digital ‘thingness’ in both blurring boundaries and nurturing the relational lives of young disabled people.