Where are we in Ireland? A Response to Mike Oliver

Rita Kwiotek, PhD Student, Department of Sociology & Political Science, NUI, Galway

Given the small amount of time I have left to respond to Professor Oliver’s presentation, I think it will make sense to concentrate on an attempt to put the main thrust of his paper into an Irish Context. In order to do this, I will first take an initial, very brief look at the recently NDA commissioned survey, Disability Related Research in Ireland 1996-2001, in the light of the three paradigms outlined in Professor Oliver’s presentation.

Second, I will use some of his main points, central to emancipatory research on disability, to ask a number of critical questions concerning the usefulness of recent Irish disability related research for the self-empowerment of disabled people in Ireland. Here, however, I will not take issue with Professor Oliver’s perspective, which I share to a point. Third, in response to the ‘Oliverian’ perspective on emancipatory research, I will be offering some critical comments from within the Irish context and from a disabled feminist standpoint I will be making some alternative theoretical and methodological suggestions.

For disabled people in Ireland it must – on the one hand - be heartening to learn that with regard to recent disability related research:

It is a concern to the NDA that very few studies are explicitly identified as emanating from a social model of disability (NDA, 2002).

On the other hand, however, it is rather alarming to find that by far the majority of the 419 cited research projects still fit the ‘positivist paradigm’, viewing disability as an individual problem or what Mike Oliver also terms, the ‘engineering model’. Even at a first glance and without any depth of analysis, it becomes fairly evident that far fewer studies fit the second of the paradigms as outlined in Oliver’s paper - the interpretive paradigm - casting disability as a social problem which Oliver equates with the ‘enlightenment model’. On a first, rough calculation I estimate, around 5 % - or maybe even less - of the 419 disability-related research projects carried out in Ireland in the late 1990s and right into the new Millennium could be evaluated as being of an emancipatory nature. Thus, fitting the third, the ‘emancipatory paradigm, presented by Oliver, conceptualising disability as a political problem and understanding policy as struggle. Whether or not disabled people in Ireland agree with Oliver’s position, I suggest that, it is useful to rephrase some of his salient statements regarding emancipatory research, turning them into evaluative questions. Such questions might, indeed, prove as helpful tools in the exercise of assessing the value of disability related research by disabled people themselves from a disabled person’s and a social model perspective. Looking at Disability Related Research in Ireland 1996 - 2001 as an example, it proves illuminating to ask the following questions, based on Mike Oliver’s paper:

• Is this disabling research?
• Has it accurately reflected the experience of Irish disabled people?
• Has it proved to be of use for the planning and provision of services?
• Has it recognised the struggles of Irish disabled people to insist that disability is a political as well as a medical and a welfare issue?
• Have disabled people experienced alienation from product and process of social research on disability?

Mike Oliver mentions in his presentation that, with regard to being researched, other social minorities and oppressed groups share similar fates with disabled people. What he fails to mention, however, is the fact that the majority of disabled people have dual or even multiple identities. Disability cuts across all other social divisions such as gender, social class or origin, age, race and sexual orientation, to name but a few. If emancipatory research is to have a transforming impact on society and social policy, then, surely, it cannot continue ignoring these factors and treat disabled people as a homogeneous group without any other social distinction. Such treatment may, indeed, turn out to prove counter-productive and even oppressive for people with more than one identity or multiple impairments. Current equality legislation in Ireland and the new Irish equality agenda allow for a more heterogeneous approach on disability, taking multivalent identities into account. In my view disabled people in Ireland cannot pass up this opportunity to look for a type of emancipatory research that demonstrates theoretical reflexivity and methodological responsiveness to diversity.

The recognition by the NDA of the dearth of emancipatory research and the lack of funding for empowering solutions which might have resulted from experiential or action approaches is also a very hopeful sign of change for future research production. Although Professor Oliver is critical of such research, pointing out a number of theoretical, methodological, ethical and ideological problems, cultural specificities particular to Ireland, the lack of indigenous disability-theory-building and the historic development of the disability movement here form a unique context, one that is all too often ignored and insufficiently explored, even by Irish researchers into disability. One that should have consequences for approaches to disability related emancipatory research design and method.

The ‘experiential approach’, for example, favoured by many feminists, disabled women and many disabled people from minority groups, suits the Irish context at present rather well, and, for the time being, should be understood as “qualitative” baseline research, complementary to baseline statistics. Neither can stand alone to close the present knowledge gap on disability in Ireland, and both approaches should only form elements of research frameworks and projects in wider research contexts.

Furthermore, not unlike positive action measures, emancipatory research sometimes needs to be exclusionary, when empowering the voice of the most oppressed. At this point in time in Ireland it is essential for more disabled people to qualify as academics and/or skilled researchers, to ensure more equal participation in the “research design, process and product”, in order to avoid further alienation from these components. There is a need for redistribution or redirection of funding, recognition of disabled people’s potential as researchers, respect for their perspectives and representation of these perspectives on any new Irish research agenda on disability. As a researcher and theorist I have been deeply influenced by black feminist thought, in particular, by Patricia Hill Collins’s (1990) use of standpoint theory. Contrary to Professor Oliver’s view I believe that standpoint theory is very important, because here in Ireland we are at a juncture where we first must recover the lived experience of disabled people, our social history and power relations to increase our own understanding and that of others.

Also, we urgently must explore the distinction of and the relationship between disability and impairment. In addition, I, furthermore, suggest the necessity to liberate impairment from its sole medical binary and explore its socio-cultural dimensions in the Irish context. However, I do agree, with Oliver’s critique that all these types of research gain nothing, if their ultimate aim is not social transformation. In the final analysis, research based on the social model must be our basis for action and inform practice. However, like Nancy Fraser (1997), in her work on “redistribution and recognition”, regarding gender and race, I recognize there are elements in modernism and postmodernism which are complementary rather than contradictory. I believe, in order to understand disability and impairment and their relationship more fully, no theory can stand alone.