Disability, Politics and the Struggle for Change

Len Barton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138148932
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134138418
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education
• Index: Social Sciences

This book seeks to explore how disability is understood and the position and experiences of disabled people both within and across different societies. The authors explore the question of politics in relation to specific struggles, providing a wealth of insights and ideas, and examine the nature and value of a social model of disability. They criticize exclusionary barriers while advancing a more democratic and participatory society based on principles of equality, offer cross-cultural insights and present stimuli for debate and further research. The text is accessible, topical, and provides new and innovatory thinking.

This book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, lecturers and researchers with interests in education, social policy, sociology and disability studies.

Chapter 1

Disability, struggle and the politics of hope

Len Barton

Introduction

In this chapter the context in which change is viewed as a necessity with regard to the position and experience of disabled people will be briefly examined. The centrality of the issue of politics will also be explored in terms of its meaning and function in contributing to the development of change. Finally, the question of hope will be discussed in relation to its motivating and unifying possibilities.

Politics

Whenever the term ‘politics’ is used it reflects a variety of possible meanings. In popular discourse, especially as expressed in the tabloid press, it is often understood in relation to particular politicians or parties and their questionable behaviour or misleading, fictitious claims or statements. Politics in this sense is viewed in terms of sleaze, corruption and as a term of abuse. The impact of these accounts have perhaps contributed to a much more common and increasing attitude among the general populace. This position views politics as being of little concern to people’s everyday lives and interests except as a topic of contempt or a source of jokes and amusement. This more general indifference is most vividly demonstrated in the declining interest in membership of political parties and the numbers who do not even exercise their vote during elections (Dean 2001; Gamble 2000). At best politics is seen as boring, and at worst irrelevant or trivial.

This disenchantment with politics in the West is for some political analysts like Gamble (2000) part of a deeper pessimism and fatalism which:

… reflects the disillusion of political hopes in liberal and socialist utopias in the Twentieth Century and a wide-spread disenchantment with the grand narratives of the Enlightenment about reason and progress, and with modernity itself. Its most characteristic expression is in the endless discourses on endism – the end of history, the end of ideology, the end of the nation state, the end of the public domain, the end of politics itself – all have been proclaimed in recent years. Our contemporary fate is to live in the iron cages erected by vast impersonal forces arising from globalisation and technology, a society which is both antipolitical and unpolitical, a society without hope or the means either to imagine or promote an alternative future. (Preface)

In his critical analysis of both the nature and validity of the claims relating to what he terms the various ‘endisms’ that are currently being promoted, Gamble seeks to re-examine the importance of politics and argues for its necessity at both an individual and societal level. In confronting the complexity of the social conditions and relations of the contemporary world, he contends, that politics is an activity, a means of creating a space in which the fundamental questions of ‘… who are we, what should we get, how shall we live’ and ‘what should be conserved, and what reformed, what should be public and what private and the rules by which societies should be governed’ (p. 1) can be seriously explored. Through this means a conception of human agency as central to the change process and of the belief in and importance of being able to create alternative visions and future possibilities are reinforced.

In an attempt to resist the dangers of extremism with regard to optimism and pessimism in relation to human agency and structural constraints, he recognises the

… inescapable tension between agency and constraint and therefore between politics and fate. (p. 17)

This is part of a more creative perspective in which:

Understood in this way fate both constrains and enables, it sets the limits but also provides opportunities. (p. 18)

So in seeking to critique the discrediting, debunking tendencies with regard to the meaning and value of politics, both in popular and academic discourses, Gamble powerfully maintains:

The political realm which is constituted by the three dimensions of the political – politics as power, politics as identity and politics as order – remains a crucial component of human experience and human capacity. (p. 6)

Each of these dimensions allows for the exploration of particular questions including; who gets what, when and how?; who are we?; how should we live?

Conflict is an integral feature of each of these spaces and involves struggles over, for example,

… who takes decisions as to how resources are allocated, and what these decisions are; conflict over identities of meaning different things and how these are expressed and represented, conflict over the constitutive principles of different political, economic and social orders. (p. 8)

Understanding the nature of and relationship between these dimensions is absolutely crucial. This is an essential feature of political activity. Its significance is particularly manifest in relation to individuals and groups who are experiencing institutionalised forms of inequality and discrimination. Addressing internal and external forms of oppression, endeavouring to identify, understand and challenge disabling barriers and seeking individual and collective empowerment and solidarity reinforce the political nature of these engagements. Disabled people are not only involved in struggles over attitudes but also over the realisation of citizenship, social justice, equity and protection through anti-discrimination legislation based on human rights.

The reduction of the space for the imagination and realisation of alternative possibilities to the present system and relations, will only be prevented by the active pursuit of the political dimensions integral to human experience. Without politics a sense of helplessness and hopelessness becomes a more ominous possibility.

Hope

A fundamental argument of this chapter is that there is now an urgency about the need for further attention being given to the development of a political analysis which is inspired by a desire for transformative change and that constitutes hope at the centre of the struggles for inclusivity. The perspective both recognises the profundity of the forms of discrimination and inequalities that need to be addressed and that this ultimately requires a collective response. Ad hoc, piecemeal or minimalist approaches to reform will be ineffectual in realising the sorts of changes required. At both an individual and collective level a crucial task is to develop a theory of political action which also involves the generation of tactics or strategies for its implementation. This is a difficult but essential agenda.

In the opening to her recent book, bell hooks (2000), the Afro-American feminist, describes an incident in her life during a period in which she was experiencing being ‘often overwhelmed by grief so profound it seemed as though an immense sea of pain was washing my heart and soul away’ (p. xv). On her way to her work at Yale University she had to pass a construction site and on one of the walls painted in bright colours was the statement: ‘The search for love continues even in the face of great odds’ (p. xv). Whenever she passed this site this affirmation of love’s possibility gave her hope.

The struggle for inclusion and more democratic forms of relationships and processes within society often seems like an impossible task. This experience often includes feelings of frustration, exhaustion and demoralisation. This is why hope is a fundamental prerequisite for the effective realisation of the struggle for transformative change.

Hope is essential in the struggle for change. It involves a recognition of the unacceptable nature of the present conditions and relations, a desire to be in a different situation and a conviction that this is possible. It involves a belief that the possibilities of change of the current situation are not foreclosed. Without hope the kind of social transformation that is being advocated will not be realised. Hope is based on critical analyses of the past and present social conditions and relations (Allman 1999). Writing on the role of pedagogy in providing serious critiques of dominant ideologies and encouraging ways of learning that are empowering, Freire (1998) contends that:

… the attempt to do without hope in the struggle to improve the world, as if that struggle could be reduced to calculated acts alone, or a purely scientific approach is a frivolous illusion. … Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle. (pp. 8 and 9)

This perspective is based on a vision of human agency and history as always in a process of becoming.

In terms of the approach being advocated in this chapter, hope reminds us of the importance of understanding the world in order to change it. It is based on a strong conviction that current conditions and relations are not natural, proper or eternal. They can be changed. Hope therefore, can mobilise, galvanise and inspire. It arises from within a social context characterised by unacceptable inequalities and discrimination.

It is of paramount importance that hope is grounded in an informed understanding of the social conditions and relations of the past; as Apple (1986) reminds us, we ‘need to recapture the past to see what is possible’ (p. 177). This historical understanding will alert us to the dangers which Simon (1987) so perceptively warns against. We must not:

… romanticise all dreams about the future. Not all fantasy is benign. The basis of what many people view as a ‘better tomorrow’ sometimes includes the unjust and oppressive disparagement or control over others. Not all dreams are dreams of hope. (p. 382)

Hope does not provide a foolproof blueprint with regard to the fixture, nor is it a wishful fantasy about how good the future will be. It does entail overlapping states of mind in which doubt will be a factor and as Lazarus (1999) maintains:

It provides the grounds for our continuing engagement in life, even when there is only a slender thread of hope on which to rely. (p. 675)

No matter how slender, it does provide a coping strategy and grounds for continuing the struggle.

While hope is deeply personal, within a social and political context in which grand narratives about the world are being discouraged and excessive individualism reinforced, there is a real danger of hope being privatised. Thus, there is a need to encourage collective hope and this is why the organisations of disabled people are so important in the struggle for personal and collective empowerment.

Social movements

Part of the struggle of groups that have been constituted as ‘other’ or negatively different, is to develop a voice in which positive images of identity are created and maintained. Social movements have specific characteristics which arise from within particular historical and socio-economic conditions. They are concerned with the pursuit of change and their forms and priorities are directed towards the realisation of a more democratic and inclusive society. Such movements are examples of forms of cultural and political opposition to those socio-economic conditions and relations that have generated and legitimated discriminatory and exclusionary policies and practices. Thus, the women’s movement, gay and lesbian movements are organisations that have been created in order to offer support and encouragement for their members as well as providing an external function, that of educating and critiquing those outside the movement.

These movements are visionary and provide resources of hope and as Taylor (1997) so perceptively maintains:

The strength of social movements lies in the types of issue that people are mobilised around; identifying the vacuum, the gaps that are not being addressed and what impact these have on the specific group to be targeted. (p. 258)

Thus they offer alternative ways of thinking and engaging with particular issues and questions, such as, identity, difference and community. They provide as Crowther and Shaw (1997) contend:

… the impetus, energy and resources which mobilise people for collective action. (p. 266)

This may encourage a strong involvement in the formal political system in the struggle for change or contribute to the generation of new forms of political activity.

Social movements are involved in challenging the status quo, in making more transparent the ways in which knowledge and power come together in relation to specific issues; they are concerned with what might yet be rather than uncritically accepting the way things are; they create spaces for new knowledge and forms of action to emerge; and finally they transform desires and raise expectations (Touraine, 1981; Scott, 1990; Crowther and Shaw, 1997).

In their insider account of the rise of the British disability movement, Campbell and Oliver (1996) highlight the four criteria derived from Marx and McAdam (1994) against which any social movement must be judged:

These are whether any new political or economic changes have resulted from its activities, whether any specific legislation has resulted, what changes in public opinion and behaviour have been produced, and whether any new organisations or institutions have been created. (p. 168)

However, Campbell and Oliver also maintain that in relation to the disability movement there are three further criteria against which the movement should be evaluated. These are:

… the extent of the consciousness raising and empowerment amongst disabled people, the extent to which disability issues are raised internationally, and the promotion of disability as a human and civil rights issue. (p. 168)

The disability movement is both a national and international development. In Britain factors such as, the increasing recognition by disabled people of the failure of party politics, charitable and voluntary organisations to meet their needs, the emergence of the civil rights movement and the feminist movement both acted as role models in the struggle for social justice, equity and anti-discrimination legislation and they all contributed to the development of the movement (Shakespeare 1993; Campbell and Oliver 1996; Oliver 1997).

According to Morris (1992a) the disability movement faces several challenges:

As with other social and political movements, the first task of the disability movement is concerned with raising our own consciousness about the way society disables us. Through that a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Disability, Struggle and the Politics of Hope
• 2. The Politics of Disability and the Struggle for Change
• 3. Disability and the Constitution of Dependency
• 4. Bending Towards Justice
• 5. Feminism and Disability: The Theoretical and Political Significance of the Personal and the Experiential
• 6. Adjudication or Empowerment: Contrasting Experiences with a Social Model of Disability
• 7. Out of the Cellars. Disability, Politics and the Struggle for Change: The Maltese Experience
• 8. Disabled People and the Politics of Partnership in Aotoaroa New Zealand
• 9. The Process of Change and the Politics of Resistance in Educational Contexts: The Case of Disability
• 10. Inclusive Education, Politics and the Struggle for Change
• 11. The Struggle for Inclusion: The Growth of a Movement
• 12. Disability Issues in the Postmodern World
• References
• Index