‘new digital repertoires for social justice, politics, and culture?: exploring disability...

‘New Digital Repertoires for Social Justice, Politics, and Culture?:

Exploring Disability Activism & Mobile & Social Media’

Gerard Goggin @ggogginDept of Media & Communications

University of SydneyWorkshop for

Concordia University Critical Disability Studies group, 16.03.2016

disability activism is one of the most interesting, and perhaps least appreciated, areas of political, social, and cultural innovation when it comes to digital technologyemerging trends, issues, challenges, and possibilities internationally arising from disability activism as it unfolds in the dynamic area of mobile and social mediaesp. interesting dynamics of disability & digital media as cosmopolitan forms of activism & citizenship cf. disability’s fraught relationship with nation state (increasingly tense under neoliberalism)

‘whilst not negating the role of more traditional protest and the need for a plurality of tactics to be used in combination with one another, the role of digital activism is now embedded in disability protest culture and set to play a crucial role in future disability politics more generally.’

Charlotte Pearson & Filippo Trevisan, ‘Disability Activism in the New Media Ecology: Campaigning Strategies in the Digital Era’, Disability & Society (2015), p, 937

Source: Violeta Blue Ayalay Facebook post

disability activism …long complex genealogies & debatesarea that needs research – international accounts now coming from outside anglophone world & dominant centres of disability research & productionModels of activism & disability movements are various, culturally, historically & political specificFor instance, the description of disability movements as ‘last civil rights’ movement is a framing that works for the US context – but not necessarily elsewhere (e.g. Bolivia)Might talk of ‘climates of disability politics’ (Sandell, Dodd & Garland-Thomson, Re-presenting Disability)

‘Youth are engaging in different forms of activism on different issues. Many young leaders with disabilities are involved in cross-issue movements, such as the Quebec student movement, the Occupy movement, and Idle No More. The approach of these leaders is very different from the approaches documented in historical accounts of Canadian disability movements.’

Christine Kelly Disability Politics and Care (2016), p. 159

‘Youth leaders and contemporary activism operate more on the level of cultural meaning making – or what Garland-Thomson calls ‘visual activism’ – than on the level of policy making, and work with and across diverse identities … The disconnect between the founding generation of Canadian disability activists and the emerging cultural, cross-issue approaches of youth leaders represents both a maturing and a divison of the movement ... there are many strands of disability organizing in Canada.’Christine Kelly Disability Politics and Care (2016), p. 159

Activism on/for digital technology‘… disability activists experimenting with uses of digital technologies, and availing themselves of the ‘democratic affordances’ they offer … Yet the very fact of the use of digital technologies by people with disabilities opens up another contradictory area to do with the technologies themselves and the philosophies and values inscribed in, and affiliated with, them.’ (Ellis, Goggin & Kent, ‘Disability’s Digital Frictions’)

media play dual role — in both shaping and enforcing disability and its closely related counterpart, normalcy; but also in offering different cultural platforms and social models for how we might re-imagine society

media (including new media) has as significant issues with disability as it does with other, interlinked issues of indigeneity, race, gender, sex, class, age - media won’t cover many disability storiesbut disability critiques of media ableism are very much a minority affair (‘why don’t you put that on the disability activism page’? - #JointDestroyer saga #criparmy ping @katharineannear )

See Ellis & Goggin, Disability & the Media (2015)

Communication & media matter in disability & social futures … but these are also framed by neoliberalisme.g. social media is lauded for its role in information, political & social participation; but most platforms are commercially owned - which at times (often) poses significant issues& the ‘social imaginaries’ of new media are often very neoliberal (e.g. ‘sharing’ = Uber) & don’t include disabilityexcept myth that technology will be the salvation of disability

disability activism in UK welfare reforms – ‘disability benefit scroungers’

Disabled people have taken social media and made it into their own medium, where they can have a voice on equal terms with their non-disabled counterparts, something not often afforded by society as a whole…The computer provides a freedom for those with disabilities, it is much easier to protest online than in the centre of London when the Tube is not accessible (quoted in: Ryan, 2014).

Many of us wouldn’t be able to campaign at all without social media … I barely get out of the house, and I’ve given up going into London at all, it’s just too exhausting with my pain-based disability. No matter how many marches on parliament are called, I’m physically excluded by the realities of disability, and that’s true for so many disabled people. Social media lets me campaign while lying flat on my back if I can’t sit up, never mind march on parliament (quoted in: Ryan, 2014).

For about 30 years, I’ve been aware that I operate in two starkly different modes … One is public, where I try and come across as energetic and animated and engaged and good at what I do. It’s a way of being that’s approved of socially. But what people don’t see is the other side, where I spend most of my time at home, a great deal of it lying down in my bed. That’s in order to prepare for the public thing, and to recover from it. I’ve always kept that hidden because it feels dangerous to make it public. It feels like I’d be misinterpreted and people won’t see me as the whole person that I am (quoted in: Adewunni, 2013).

‘tendency for online media – especially social networking platforms – to blur the distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ … and the need for innovative campaigning groups to also become visible in traditional media debates in order to be able to foster concrete policy change’

Pearson & Filippo Trevisan, ‘Disability Activism in the New Media Ecology: Campaigning Strategies in the Digital Era’, Disability & Society (2015), p, 937

‘[[in UK Disabled People Against Cuts/DPAC 2012 campaign] emergence of personal stories of disability discrimination as both online campaign tools and newsworthy material contributes to the politicisation of the private sphere in a way that promotes a more ‘inclusive’ form of citizenship (Lister 2007) for disabled people’

Pearson & Filippo Trevisan, ‘Disability Activism in the New Media Ecology: Campaigning Strategies in the Digital Era’, Disability & Society (2015), p, 937

Recent Australia cases ofdisability activism & social media

Closure of ABC Ramp Up disability blog

TEDx Sydney 2015 & #stellaschallenge

#JointDestroyer -

Nov 2015 Destroy the Joint controversy

‘Facebook and Twitter in these protests were often part of the now typically cross-referenced (and to some extent commercially integrated) ecology of convergent, online, social, mobile, and locative media technologies and applications—including YouTube, Vimeo, Pinterest, Flickr and Instagram’‘… widespread availability of mobile digital devices such as smart phones and tablets that allow for the rapid dissemination of these platforms to people both involved in protests but also to others in a timely fashion’ (Ellis, Goggin & Kent, ‘Disability’s Digital Frictions’)