“Disability, Power & Accountability”talk for Power & Accountability USYD Research Collaboration

Monday 10 August 2015

Gerard Goggin @ggogginDept of Media & Communications

Why disability?• 20% of Australian counted as having significant disability or

impairment• Disability no longer understood on a ‘deficit’ (e.g. biomedical or

charity model), but as part of diversity of human life (e.g. all can be disabled if we live long enough)

• Disability as new socio-political space• Disability presents new ideas about

– The human (& the animal & environment)– Culture– Power– Accountability

• On power & accountability, it could be useful to think about what disability tells us about ‘listening’

disability & listening• ‘listening’ has emerged as rich social, cultural, & political concept – connecting

different realms/sectors/institutions/movementsSusan Bickford The dissonance of democracy: Listening, conflict, and citizenship (1996)Les Back The Art of Listening (2007)Kate Lacey’s Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (2013) Tanja Dreher, (2010) ‘Speaking up or being heard? Community media interventions and the politics of listening’ Media, Culture and Society 32(1): 1-19

• ‘For me, the question “who should speak?” is less crucial than “who will listen?” “I will speak for myself as a Third World person" is an important position for political mobilization today. But the real demand is that, when I speak from that position, I should be listened to seriously …’ – Gayatri Spivak (1986) Questions of Multi-Culturalism: Sneja

Gunew and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Hecate , Vol. 12, No. 1/2 , November 3, 1986 • Especially promising & challenging questions are raised by thinking about disability

& listening, e.g. • Cate Thill (2014). Listening for policy change: how the voices of disabled people

shaped Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme. Disability and Society, DOI: 10.1080/09687599.2014.987220

… raising the question of how speech that no one listens to can be useful. From this, an additional new idea emerged: there should be a “right to be heard” in the sense of there being a human entitlement to be taken seriously, as well as having one’s views listened to. (Hamelink, 2014, p. 23).

new modes of listening unfolding from the socio-technical practices of users with disabilities … Can we indeed contemplate the prospect of any person following suit to adopt new listening practices – those who occupy the unmarked ‘non-disabled’ (normal) position becoming listeners to media user producers marked as ‘disabled’? (Goggin, ‘Disability & The Ethics of Listening’, 2009)

Case 1: UK welfare reforms – ‘disability benefit scroungers’

Case 2: media & disability in Australa

Closure of ABC Ramp Up disability blog

TEDx Sydney 2015 & #stellaschallenge

Further info/referencesLiz Crow, Bedding Out, http://www.roaring-girl.com/work/bedding-out/Katie Ellis & Gerard Goggin. Disability and the Media (Palgrave, 2015)

Katie Ellis, Gerard Goggin, and Mike Kent. ‘Dis-entanglements of Disability and Digital Technology’. Fibreculture Journal 24 (2015), forthcoming Katie Ellis and Gerard Goggin. “Disability Media Participation: Obstacles, Opportunities, and Politics” Media International Australia 154 (March 2015): 78-88. Gerard Goggin. ‘Communication Rights and Disability Online: Policy and Technology after the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS),’ Information, Communication & Society 18.3 (2015): 327-341. Gerard Goggin. ‘Disability and the Ethics of Listening: New Models for Democracy and Media’. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 23.4 (2009): 489-502. Gerard Goggin & Dinesh Wadiwel, ‘Australian disability reform and political participation’, Australian Review of Public Affairs, September 2014Gerard Goggin & Christopher Newell, Disability in Australia: Exposing a Social Apartheid (UNSW Press, 2005)Penny O’Donnell, Tanja Dreher, and Justine Lloyd (2009) ‘Listening, pathbuilding and continuations: A research agenda for the analysis of listening’, Continuum, 23:4,423 -439Soldatic, K., Morgan, H. & Roulstone, A. (eds) 2014, Disability, Spaces and Places of Policy Exclusion, Routledge, London and New YorkCatherine Thill & Gerard Goggin, Disability & Listening, forthcomingGerard Goggin and Katie Ellis. ‘Doing Justice to Disability: The Upside of TEDx’s Stella Bungle’. The Conversation, 26 May, 2015, https://theconversation.com/doing-justice-to-disability-the-upside-of-tedxs-stella-bungle-42324