“I don’t have the luxury of being able to do nothing”: exploring temporalities and navigations of everyday mobility through the experiences of people with multiple sclerosis

Work in mobilities on (dis)ability has not yet considered progressive conditions and their temporalities, which this study seeks to address by engaging with the experiences, practices and adaptations of people with multiple sclerosis (MS). Overlapping temporalities and immobility emerged as central within a proposed dynamic that takes imposed and negatively experienced adaptations of (im)mobility and replaces them with more agentive and positively experienced practices. Such practices, however, are undermined by the tensions of MS’ short- and long-term variabilities, progressions and uncertainties. I expand the concept of temporal work beyond the present to include past experiences and future anticipations/mitigations. Previous theorisations of therapeutic mobility are extended through accounts of people with MS to consider complex temporal tensions with what I term therapeutic immobilities. Finally, I build on the idea of interdependence to propose assemblages of interdependencies as a way of understanding the intimately connected navigations, experiences, meanings and values of everyday (im)mobility and acknowledging their emergent and complex temporalities. The concept offers an alignment of relational models of disability with assemblages that comprise and respond to both material environments and bodies.