7 Working with NGOs

GILL EREAUT

So, some NGOs, some charities, for example, are about the right size for us because they have a relatively small decision making body and they can say, yeah, it makes sense, we want to do it. But there is another kind of project that we do which is to look at the public discourse of something. Many organisations – like a third-sector organisation and some public sector bodies – the public discourse is very important to them because that, in a sense, is a core issue for them – to disrupt or negotiate an existing public dominant discourse. And often, I think, those organisations … people in them might have already an awareness of the importance of a public discourse to what they’re trying to do.

They will sometimes talk about … we need to change the language about X; and so what we’re offering them is a concrete way to map the X in order to be able to disrupt or to negotiate or to intervene or however they conceptualise what they’re doing. So we did some work looking at the public discourse around disability in the UK, and we did it for the major charity in the field. The headlines about the public discourse of disability are that – in the UK at the time we did the work which was 2013 – it seemed to us to be a very stable, almost ‘stagnant’ discourse. Very little kind of room for manoeuvre within it, and it had a lot of, I suppose, generalising, totalising kind of qualities to it. So, the disabled, ‘the disabled’, for a start, you know that form rather than ‘disabled people’ or any other kind of constructions, but those people with disabilities were consistently positioned as passive – as having things done to them – and you could see that again lexically, through metaphor and through transitivity. They were positioned as to be pitied. But what was most interesting in that piece of work was not the dominant discourse – it was useful to map it and actually show in a sense how profoundly stagnant it was – but were the peripheral counter-dominant discourses. There was some very interesting emergent kind of discourses that didn’t actually try to overtly overturn the dominance around passivity and so on – and otherness – but kind of sidestepped it. So, for example, there is a strand of comedy like The Last Leg, which was presented by three people: two of them had some kind of disability and one didn’t. It used the framework of a ‘ladsy’ late night chat show. It just happened upon disability from time to time. Disability was a topic, but it was a recurring topic like sex and football. And what we were talking about was the normalising without calling out. So it took disability into a powerfully attractive cultural frame of the late night ‘ladsy’ kind of chat show without saying we are about disability.