Advocates of the social model will know the ideology and reasoning behind its success. It focuses on the disabling things that join people together so that we can fight on united issues and united fronts. Individual and personal experiences were resigned and deemed irrelevant and a distraction to the main cause of equal rights.
Over the years we have as a society become a lot more inward looking. This has been in part due the advent of consumer culture and technology encouraging social engagement on a personal level, as well as the so called breakdown of the family, evidenced by the increase in single person households and wide ranging definitions of what a family is and other factors.
Another massive impact that has created a massive shift in our thinking about society has been the rise of celebrity culture. As a society we have become fascinated by celebrities boring, mundane and day to day lives. Magazines such as now, more, heat etc. have fuelled this trend for knowing everything there is to know about your favourite celebrity. Not only that, technology has enabled us to interact with these famous people on a personal level (twitter, facebook etc) and make it appear that this sort of lifestyle is somehow within everyones reach.
So, why would this have an impact on how disability campaigners best reach their audience? Surely we should still stay united (united we stand etc) and carry on with the protests and the big unifying messages of stop the welfare reform bill etc?
Well yes, of course it should continue. But by failing to recognise this shift in culture and using it to best advantage would be a disastrous mistake for the disability movement. There have been some fantastic examples recently of how well one persons story can have a massive impact within the media and on social networking sites, and probably more impact than she was expecting or had even imagined.
For the last few weeks Sue Marsh has been creating a research project and a fund to campaign against the disability welfare cuts. This has been mainly done through twitter and her blog. However, by having the 'bravery' (I use that term in the best possible way, not in a patronising way) to relay her personal 'tragedy' (again another horrible word, sorry) of how she has lost her DLA award and that due to this research project wont have the ability to fight both campaigns, shot both stories into unexpected and never before seen media coverage and it felt like the internet had finally awoken to what the disability movement was actually saying.
In the last few years, the broken of britain have also used stories to effectively engage people into thinking differently about disability and the impact that cuts in services and benefits will have on people. There have also been high profile stories seen in the media of people who have died supposedly at the hands of welfare reform. These stories reached national papers, the hardest hit rally in october, and the christmas card signing reached the local news. Should we not take from this that the future lies in combining big campaigns with personal stories in order to effectively get the message across?
People don't want to see faceless campaigns anymore, the cultures changed. Disabled people need to be brave enough to tell that horrible story about their personal experience of being discriminated against, or having their benefit taken away from them. But they also need to combine it with how people can take action.
Society has become nosey, so disabled people need to let them nose around, and let people know what its like to walk in their shoes, and refer them back to the big campaigns such as the hardest hit and pats petition and writing to mps etc. so that hopefully things will change.
There is still a place for the big and far reaching campaigns, as the way society has organised itself hasn't changed. IE In order for change to happen, the power still lies within the political and law making processes in government, and in order for individuals to engage in that process unification under a big organisation is still an essential tool of campaigning, but it is in how disabled people engage others to join in that has changed. It is no longer enough for these campaigns to exist and for people to see how wrong society is, there needs to be an additional personal element to it all.
So how does this all equate with social model ideology that says our stories are irrelevant to making changes happen? I think that it still has a place within all this 'new thinking'. It is important to focus our stories and personal experience into that ideology, and not to fall into the trap of personal tragedy and more 'medical model' story telling. Sue Marsh did that beautifully, in combing her medical conditions with her fight for her own DLA, as well as others, the focus isn't on her medical conditions, or her 'overcoming adversity' to campaign, but the coverage has equalised all three areas of her life transforming what could have potentially been a 'woe is me' type story into a negative account of her DLA appeal (personal), a neutral account of her conditions (personal) and a positive account of her campaign (political). It feels like each bit has neutralised and balanced out the other.
I think we need to learn from this, and take advantage of how much of an impact it has had, by keeping the pressure on, and keep telling similar personal stories to the newspapers. I have been talking to one about my story, perhaps others should do the same?
No comments:
Post a Comment