The affects of pushing: chronic illness, remote work, and crip epistemology

This article explores how different bodyminds experience working from home. During qualitative interviews with chronically ill women working remotely in Australia, ‘pushing’ emerged as a repeated refrain to describe their ways of navigating everyday experiences of pain, social relations, movements, and schedules. Beyond a generalised description of linear force, we develop the concept of ‘pushing’ in geography by unravelling its multiple affects. By discussing three affective configurations of pushing explained by our participants – ‘pushing through’ as an exhausting desire to fit in at work, a disorienting ‘pushing for’ working from home arrangements in anticipation of pain and illness, and ‘pushing back’ when working from home as concealment that leads to feelings of disconnection – we argue that the notion of ‘pushing’ reveals everyday work negotiations that often remain hidden in dominant narratives of remote and hybrid work. We contend that pushing is not only a survival strategy, but also a criptic epistemology, which offers crucial insights into the ambiguous (un)affective ways chronically ill women navigate, or are failed by, relationships at work, workplace access, inclusion policies, and legal protections.