Once the story was told, the ethnographic chapter, I was able to sit and reflect on what I had found striking about my visits and the story they helped narrate. This was the theoretical part of the work, using the analysis tool, the crip-sensitivity described earlier. It’s my ability to read into culture that helped me identify what made an organisation accountable - or a culture emancipatory. Moving from field to chair was more challenging than I’d anticipated. However, from the chair it became apparent that while the social model, as a theory, has been so successful at beginning a conversation about rights, it is overly simplistic when applied to the legitimacy an organisation can seek to respond to the growing insistence of activist to have a dialogue on rights. It is not wrong, it’s knowers need acknowledgement, but it can lack finesse and depth. Particularly, when applied to the articulation of accountability of organisations where workers are entering the private worlds of disabled people. Mainly because to be accountable, see previous post, workers straddle a market/citizen divide, in that they are visitors in people homes, treading as guests, therefore need to managed their power [thank you @NHS_RobW]. How do we then transfer what describes a respectful relationships into professionalism within strategic conversations. Conversations that talk about groups, their power and interest, rather than viewing disabled people as consumers in market where their citizenship is eroded. Talking about groups within an unequal society is an additional conversation, not an alternative one, the personal exchange still needs to be respectful. So sat in the chair, fingers poised on the keyboard, I began a reflexive process. I started in my mind with the words: what struck me.
I noticed, for example, that the welcome was far more attentive than those I am used to. It didn’t fade, it was a proactive, engaged and very intentional - sign that every worker takes radical hospitality seriously. ‘Bathing the room with sunshine’ was a phrase used to denote the worker’s intention to see the best in situations and the good in people. I sat alongside workers deliberate in both thought, and measured in their practice, with the energy they employed to anticipate the positive and celebrate the possible.
I also was struck by the number of times workers voiced their thinking and ideas. It was as though they had to ‘say it’ in order to remain vigilant against a culture that was toxic but also too compelling to ignore. A deviant culture here, I noted, was not one of positive spin. Critically, positive stories were all about telling of the energy in the void, and highlighting an unacknowledged capacity. This was done with an enthusiasm for individuality I have seldom seen elsewhere. Unlike those who grasp at what they see as the upside of a negative, all too often often insulting in its bias and simplistic to the point of insult. What I saw was a real wish to appreciate the pleasure people enjoyed in their lives. This so obvious pleasure in sharing time and space was sustained in every exchange, without fuss or effort but with both humour and seriousness.
I noticed that the only thing that remained a constant was change! A state of flux was the norm, and trying to pin down what naturally moves was expressed as counter-culture. All the conversations I took part in were underlined by an anticipation of continual shift, with this a realignment of existing patterns. This, I felt, ensured that what mattered to each person was kept alive, an acknowledged priority, because it was at the centre of current business. I loved the phrase ‘turn over the one-page-profile’, because all too often disabled people’s lives are limited by the paperwork that sets their position in stone. Thus crystallised any further progress is limited if not impossible. This is a real issue within the context of the Global Development Goals. How can we say to be emancipatory if we know that many are being held back by being held down.
In disability services, as in human services more widely. Where support is turned into a paid commodity, money goes into the organisation and is then divided into silos before decisions are made about what it funds. Options are then made from piecemeal bits, never again to been seen as a myriad of choices to meet the variety of needs, wants and preferences of a population. Here money goes to the middle, to the disabled people the organisation serves, ensuring the power is always in the hands of those holding the purse. As so many debates have shown, allowing people few options already constrained by crumbs within separate services, is not the same as asking people what to provide. Even where sometimes support to choose is required, the crux is having control. Please also note, these are very basic needs. The time people get up, shower, eat, take a walk, shop, or have a ciggy. Robbing people of dignity under the misdirection that none of us are totally free is grossly misreading the impact of abusive systems.
In short, I slowly worked towards a view of emancipatory practice as closely aligned to the human rights articulation if social justice. To counter injustice, emancipation needed to underpinned by a dismantling of institutionalisation. Therefore, best defined by independent living, anticipating a future with freedom, control, choice, and dignity, in the home, at work and in the community. This idea, I believe, sits right at the heart of accounting for society and the environment debates. Because, it positions a globe-local interest clearly, with the problems of the unsustainable nature of support provision. Like so many other services dealing with human being within a market that eclipses the inequitable pressures above each individual, in the wider consumerist society within a neoliberal ideology. What I felt was emancipatory, was not about the disabled individual [empowerment was always only served by best practice], but about every action joining up to resist ableism more widely within the organisation. Even beyond its boundaries its impact can be felt, as if a bubble the culture acts as a shield of sorts, but also a beacon of hope acting as a possibility of what can be done. A decade ago the narrative didn’t allow such option, it was impossible by being unimaginable. It can be seen as in the same way as sexism rose above the issue of misogyny, sexism was the addition of the dimensions of institutional discrimination and systemic inequality that characterises women’s oppression - globally and in locality. This isn’t to say that hate crime against disabled people shouldn’t be tackled, but that without a fuller understanding of the ableism that feeds it it will be perceived as a personal dislike not a human rights crisis. I would argue the later needs to be part of the accounting profession’s cris de cœur, a passionate stand for equality in a climate that does little to address it.
To be continued
And to end…
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