Authenticity in Crisis: Maternal Advocacy and Existential Caregiving Across the Institutional Networks of Disability and Care

Abstract

This article offers an existential-phenomenological, hermeneutically informed case study of Cecelia, a Latine immigrant mother raising an autistic child, interpreting how advocacy and caregiving are lived within the technocratic architectures of special education and social services. Treating Cecelia’s narrative as a text of lived experience, I conduct an iterative reading of three interviews and reflexive memos to trace how institutional languages of “progress,” compliance, and partnership meet the embodied rhythms of maternal care. Cecelia’s account discloses caregiving as relational labor shaped by exclusion yet animated by meaning-making and resistance. Her experiences show how schools can mistake presence for partnership and inclusion for engagement, narrowing the space where maternal knowledge is recognized as knowledge. This idiographic interpretation clarifies how everyday maternal practices both confront and exceed constraint, and it invites attention to the interpretive conditions under which trust and collaboration become possible.