Feeling a part of society, not apart from society – the psychology of inclusion

“Well how sad. A city with such appalling accessiblity as Bristol really hurts. To be made so unwelcome by a place’s physical make up is like an apartheid that can only change when the environment does. To live with #EnvironmentalApartheid tears at your soul.”

Mik Scarlett, via Twitter

Perhaps as a result of its Marxist origins, disability rights discourse in the UK has tended towards a highly materialist account of the barriers and inequality faced by disabled people: focusing on income, physical access or employment discrimination for example.  Even when talking about prejudicial behaviour, such as disability hate crime, the feelings of those who have endured it, or who fear it and the impact on their sense of their place in the world is rarely discussed.

Various things have collided in the past year to cause me to think about this: during some work I did talking to people with learning disabilities about employment, interviewees consistently highlighted having a role, status and a sense of purpose as being at least as important to them as having money in their desire to work, or in having found a job; conversations begun and curated by Mik Scarlett on social media about the emotional impact of being locked out of society by inaccessibility that says ‘you don’t belong’; the fact that 60% of disabled people who voted in the EU referendum put their cross next to Leave, despite so much evidence that it was not in their self-interest to do so; and this week Margaret Hodge’s recollection of her father’s advice “you’ve got to keep a packed suitcase at the door, Margaret, in case you ever have to leave in a hurry”.

Each of the above speaks to the psychology of inclusion and exclusion and of the desire, as Baroness Jane Campbell recently put it ‘to feel a part of society, not apart from society.’  Looked at through the lens of psychology – both disabled people’s own and that of the wider community – the past decade of cuts to financial and practical support can be seen not only for its damaging effect on material wellbeing, but equally for the way it has often appeared to dismiss disabled people’s very right to be in the world.  Ditto arriving in a city and being literally shut out.   On the flipside, in foregrounding how such negative developments and situations make people feel there may be greater chance of engendering empathy, than in only describing situations that non-disabled people have little if any experience of.   Feelings of hurt, loss, fear and hope are universal; experience of disabling barriers is not.

Great strides have been made on disability rights over the past thirty years, but inclusion remains precarious and far from guaranteed.  Despite the language of rights, inclusion remains something that can be given or taken away and so long as that is how disabled people feel about the world, we are way off our goals,

A recalibrated disability rights agenda should foreground psychology – how people feel about the world they inhabit – and make disabled people’s own sense of purpose, status, belonging and control the chief test of progress, its narrative to the wider world and focus for action.