32 Disability rights advocacy goes digital
Filippo Trevisan, American University
In 1980, scholar and activist Vic Finkelstein pictured a future in which “impaired persons will […] no longer be oppressed by disabling social conventions and disabling environments but will be absorbed in the mainstream of social interactions.” In his vision, technology was to be an important enabler of social change and play a fundamental role in the “liberation” of disabled people. Today, we live in a world where connectivity is ubiquitous and new media technologies foster “always on” lifestyles. Yet, Finkelstein’s hypothesis remains largely untested and our understanding of the relationship between disability and the Internet is incomplete.
“Digital disability” studies, as Gerard Goggin and Christopher Newell described the study of the relationship between disability and digital media just over a decade ago, have grown substantially in recent years. Yet, virtually all of this work has framed the discussion in terms of access and accessibility. Indeed, these are crucial issues that ought to be top priorities for policy-makers, technology developers, and disability campaigners. At the same time, however, I also believe that limiting ourselves to this perspective will lead us to overlook an essential part of the picture. A different aspect that certainly deserves to be explored is that of online disability rights advocacy.
As a passionate observer of the potential of new media technologies for empowering groups that traditionally are excluded from the civic arena, I have been watching with great interest as UK disability rights groups “tuned” into social media in ever increasing numbers from late 2010 onwards. This was a major shift in their approach to technology as, as recently as 2009, disability organizations appeared somewhat distrustful towards ICTs and particularly reluctant to engage with social media.
All this changed suddenly in response to the then Conservative-Liberal Democrat UK government’s proposals for a radical overhaul of disability welfare in 2010, which challenged some of the main principles behind disability welfare entitlement and allocations. Very rapidly, a range of different disability groups decided that it was time to use digital media for mobilizing, organizing, and challenging legacy media narratives of disability welfare. Not only established charity organizations experimented with innovative tactics in digital campaigning, but new collaborations were forged too, sometimes where ancient rifts had existed, and wholly new groups of disabled activists were formed online. Given their internal structure, type of leadership, and relationship with the Internet, I proposed in previous work that these groups could be seen as falling into three different categories, including:
- Formal organizations: pre-existing disability organizations that use the Internet to boost their campaigns (including both non-profit and membership groups);
- “Digitized