Hello, my dear readers, and welcome to the second instalment of #WordyandWheelyWednesdays! (I must confess that, in the absence of regular internet access, this one has been sneakily written as a Word document over Monday and Tuesday evenings and just scheduled to upload today – but that’s how I’m making the weekly posting work well, so hopefully you’ll forgive me!)
Following last week’s post for World Cerebral Palsy Day 2016, which I wrote as a sort of bullet-pointed ode to my disability and some of the many things I’ve learnt from it, I’ve been thinking a lot about that teaching – particularly in relation to my point on the importance of friendship. More broadly, now that I’m not trying to fit it into a concise bullet point, that can be expanded to a sense of belonging and community. So, for this week’s post, I thought I’d write about something I’m involved in at the moment that epitomises their importance – Warwick Enable.
Warwick Enable is the Students’ Union disability liberation society. It brings together disabled students/students with disabilities (more on terminology in another post), our friends, carers, PAs, enablers and allies to socialise and to work towards making campus more inclusive and accessible. We are open to everyone who cares about disability as a social justice issue. I say ‘we’, here, because I’ve been given the great honour of being President for this academic year – which brings me back to the ideas of community and belonging. On Thursday last week, I returned to the Societies Fair, this time to promote Enable to the new cohort of Freshers (of which I knew there would be a fair few, thanks to social media). I was joined by the wonderful people who make up the rest of the Exec – Katie, the Campaigns Officer; Sara, the Social Secretary and current Marketing whizz; and Rob, the Treasurer. They are excellent humans, all very lovely and just as passionate about Enable being considered on an equal level with the other liberation societies who (this year) we were granted a stall beside. We are still fairly small in comparison, so the aim is very much to grow, in order to create a stable base from which to offer a safe space for support and a forum for advocacy and change. We have lots of plans for campaigns! As a result, if anyone showed interest, we were delighted – and we have some wonderful new members from across the university (both with and without disabilities) who are raring to go.
Often, however, the interest came by way of the following question: ‘So, you’re a charity project fundraising to help disabled people, right?’, and then, when we gently said ‘We actually campaign about disability issues on campus, so if that’s something you’d be keen on –’, they left before we could finish the sentence. Now, fundraising is extremely important, and it’s something I myself have benefitted from through a number of different (and fabulous!) organisations. What struck us, though, was the assumption that that is what Warwick Enable does. People noticed that we were about disability and immediately equated that with ‘charity’ and ‘needing help’. It really brought home to us that (even in the twenty-first century, even among our generation) disability isn’t usually interpreted as relating to human rights, social justice issues and equal permission to belong, but rather as something ‘lacking’, requiring ‘help’, ‘pity’ and even cure. I am very much aware of this trend through all of the reading I do for my thesis (more on the various ‘models of disability’ in a future post), and from personal experiences with random strangers on the street, but to have it repeatedly displayed within the context of a Societies Fair during which we were very much linked to the other liberation groups was both intriguing and actually rather horrifying.
I guess it showed us just how much work we and Warwick Enable have to do to educate and mobilise the student body – every body. On that note, I’d better sign off and get back to it, because that’s essentially the point of my thesis!
Until next week, then, with much Wordy and Wheely love x
