ABSTRACT
In March 2014, the information technology (IT) outsourcing firm Atos Origin settled with the U.K. government to terminate early its multi-year multi-million pound contract to carry out the controversial Work Capability Assessment (WCA) tests on Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) claimants. Although the exact impact of disability rights activism on this decision cannot be measured, the high-profile protests that a range of advocacy groups organised against Atos are likely to have played a role in this process. As a senior Atos executive explained during a Westminster select committee hearing in 2014, for the previous few years disability rights advocates successfully publicised episodes that showed Atos’s misconduct in WCA tests and contributed to tarnishing its reputation. The early termination of this contract was an important victory for U.K. disability advocates and was underpinned by a substantial amount of change and revitalisation in the disability rights movement. As the research discussed in this book has shown, new media technologies played an important role in this process of reform and renewal. In the U.K., the sense of urgency sparked by the government’s decision to bring forward a radical reform of disability welfare in 2010, coupled with the opportunities for participatory campaigning offered by social media, re-shaped disability advocacy significantly. In the U.S. too, e-advocacy has become ubiquitous among disability rights organisations, although so far it has not fostered the kind of profound changes seen in Britain with regard to structure, tactics and leadership. It was particularly interesting to see digital media make such an
impression in an area of advocacy that before 2010 seemed very sceptical about the opportunities offered by online communications (Trevisan 2014). In just a few years, Internet-based media went from being an irrelevant civic resource for disabled people, to important platforms for public participation. This book explored this new advocacy landscape and discussed its inherent opportunities, challenges and potential contradictions. Although the case study approach displayed in this work requires caution in trying to generalise its findings, several trends emerged here that transcended individual cases, inviting reflections on the transformations
underway in the realm of citizen-initiated politics, as well as the direct impact of these changes on disabled people’s political inclusion. Three main issues came to the fore in this book, including:
1 Changes in the ecology of British disability advocacy, including the emergence of new types of groups and the transformation of existing organisational forms;
2 Anewmodel of ‘peer-mediated’ yet democratically ambiguous citizenship supported by the emergence of a young, technology-savvy disabled leadership; and, finally,
3 The centrality of circumstantial factors – in particular crisis – in the evolution of e-advocacy.
