ABSTRACT
Moving from the idea that mobilisation and grassroots advocacy often flourish in response to events that disrupt the status quo, this chapter provides an overview of the groups that used new media technologies to oppose a radical reformof disabilitywelfare in theU.K. between 2010 and 2012.What kinds of groups turned to new media to voice dissent against these policy proposals? To what extent did the Web presence of these groups facilitate interactive and participatory advocacy? Were disabled self-advocates and ordinary users involved in these efforts and, if so, inwhat roles? And, finally, what other actors did these groups connect to and interact with in the online sphere? This chapter addresses these questions by identifying the British disability advocacy groups – both established and emergent – thatweremost visible on the Internet at the peak of the welfare reform debate and therefore had the greatest chance to attract supporters, both disabled and non-. Their e-advocacy strategies are explored through a detailed inventory of their technological preferences, interviewswithkey figureswithin a range of these groups and Web link analysis with IssueCrawler. Three main types of groups emerged that relied on online media to
oppose the then Conservative-led coalition’s government plan to reform disability welfare. These included: formal disability organisations (both ‘professionalised’ charities and self-advocacy groups); experienced disabled activists who had been part of the disabled people’s movement in the 1980s and 1990s, and joined forces again to protest against the welfare reform; and, finally, a new generation of technology-savvy disabled bloggers who came together as an advocacy group for the first time in the wake of the welfare reform controversy. In particular, disabled bloggers were able to take advantage of their familiarity with technology to launch a new ‘genre’ in British disability advocacy. They provided potential supporters with a flexible range of opportunities for becoming involved in the activities they launched, which arguably occupied an intermediate position between those promoted by formal organisations and the ones sponsored by more ‘militant’ protest groups. After discussing this new typology of British disability advocacy,
this chapter focuses in detail on three emblematic case studies, including:
The Hardest Hit; Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC); and The Broken of Britain. In particular, the nature of each of these groups and their relationship with technology is explored in detail, laying the foundations for further investigation on their potential for user-empowerment in the remainder of this book. While the findings discussed in this chapter show that each group had adopted a different online advocacy repertoire depending on its ethos, history and ambitions, results also revealed that the use of social media platforms had become ubiquitous across the entire organisational spectrum. This marked an important departure from the reluctance of both disability non-profits and self-advocacy groups to embrace participatory technology until recently (Trevisan 2012, 2014) and injected newvitality into British disability advocacy at a time of crisis. However, the three approaches to e-advocacy outlined here also prompted fundamental questions about their potential to empower disabled Internet users and raise their stakes in citizenship. Chapters 4 and 5 address these questions by discussing in detail the use of Facebook in each of the three groups that are introduced here.
