Intersections between disability and other factors (race, gender, additional disabilities) can impact the experiences of individuals who do not fit into the wholly non-disabled, neurotypical society.
Within the arts and especially within teaching there are ways this can impact students – Christine Sun Kim says she was barred from certain modules and night courses due to lack of availability of a sign language interpreter (2023), which excludes deaf students from having the same access to education as their peers.
Watching Chey Brown’s interview (2023) made me further think about how exclusive society can be – the interview is captioned in large text (great for those who are deaf or with mild visual impairments), however the phrase “cis-passing” is miscaptioned as “suspassing”. This mishearing proves that despite having a trans person on camera, no one behind the scenes was aware enough of LGBTQIA+ terminology enough to spot or correct the mistake. Without understanding of the communities they are trying to represent it is easy to put the speaker in a place where their voice is not genuinely being heard.
UAL supposedly has a lot of rules and policies in place to cater towards additional access needs – however these are not easy to find and are not known by all staff. Furniture layouts are required to have a 90cm radial gap between each item to allow for the turning of a wheelchair. While we have this rule in place in all our layouts, this would only accommodate the smallest wheelchair size. The student wheelchar users I have worked with have all had larger motorised chairs which take up much more room than 90cm, begging the question of who these policies actually benefit – the wheelchair users themselves or just the planners who can use it as a tickbox in claiming to have accommodated for additional needs.
Physical disabilities are often the easiest to talk about, however disabilities also include things like chronic pain, chronic fatigue and neurodivergency which can be harder to spot. Students are able to disclose information about their disabilities, if they wish, to their academic tutors however this is not shared across technical spaces. A better system is needed so that the onus is not on students to have to disclose the information themselves every single time they enter a new technical area or interact with a new technician, or on the technician to be able to accurately diagnose and predict the needs of an entire student body. We are more than able to adapt our processes and how we teach, however without that service being advertised it is possible that students would be too shy to ask, or worse, assume that we couldn’t and not even come to the workshop.
There’s a lot that needs to be done across multiple job families at UAL before we can say as an institution that we are true allies to all types of disability, however there are members of the UAL community doing their best within their roles to make change – “if we give people the opportunity to shine, the sky’s the limit” (Adepitan, 2020, quoted in ParalympicsGB).
ParaPride (2023) Intersectionality in Focus: Empowering Voices during UK Disability History Month 2023. [YouTube video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yID8_s5tjc (Accessed: 30 April 2025).
Art21 (2023) Christine Sun Kim in “Friends & Strangers” – Season 11 | Art21. [YouTube video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NpRaEDlLsI (Accessed: 30 April 2025).
ParalympicsGB (2020) Ade Adepitan gives amazing explanation of systemic racism. [YouTube video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAsxndpgagU (Accessed: 30 April 2025).
Response 3
UAL’s rules where ‘Furniture layouts are required to have a 90cm radial gap between each item to allow for the turning of a wheelchair’ are similar tot he construction drawings rules we had at Tate and V&A when I worked there so it’s really important to hear that the new ‘larger motorised chairs [which] take up much more room than 90cm’ for inclusive practice across the cultural sector.
I found Chey Brown’s interview (2023) interesting because he highlighted for me further contentions within society that he felt his CIS white privilege even though he still had many intersectional discriminatory experiences. As a white, working class, northern female with ADD I felt like working in studios that were often 70% CIS male, a challenge and often felt strongly about working towards anti racism beucase the thought of having even more intersectional challenges (race, gender, additional disabilities) impacting on their day to day life. This led me to many BLM marches where ‘silence = violence’ and working on the NHM history of colonialism https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/are-natural-history-museums-inherently-racist.html to make sure these often hidden stories are told.
I worked on ‘Queer British Art’ https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/queer-british-art-1861-1967at Tate and again felt really strongly about advocating for the LGBTQIA+ community as an ally and also worked on Pride for Selfridges with artist and friend Luke Embden on bringing the floats to celebrate uniqueness to life.
I want to share https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/soul-nation-art-age-black-power because this whole exhibition refocussed its marketing campaign to reach audiences and to engage at grass roots level with people whose lived experiences are represented in this exhibition. There was much more of a community and local focus to share art and promote the fact that it’s for everyone.
Thanks Jo, interesting to hear that the 90cm turning circle rule seems standardised even across other institutions. This dauntingly almost feels like it would be harder to change and adapt within UAL then, if they can claim they are working to the same framework as a much wider sector. Implementing a larger minimum turning circle difference would definitely impact space within the uni – thinking here about the LCF and CSM sewing machine bench setups which I have heard are very tightly packed in, possibly due to a large number of students needing them. Makes you wonder if the university cares more about providing equal opportunity for disabled and non disabled students, or if they’d rather have more students (needing more machines) so they can make more money. Thanks for sharing the Tate links – I wasn’t in London at the time but looks like a good show.
Your observation about ‘the phrase “cis-passing” being miscaptioned as “suspassing” is so insightful. It makes me think about care and labour and language. I was struck by the phrase you use ‘to cater towards’. To cater for someone has implications of hosting but also specificity. It contains overtones of additional rather than basic fundamental needs. You allude to the spectral (not sure I’ve got the right word here – I mean looking like they are doing it on the website etc) approach to reasonable adjustments where institutions have policies that align with disability rights law but don’t always put sufficient resources in place to enact these policies. Then individuals can work hard to be inclusive but also miss things, have gaps in care, because they are working alone and unsupported.
Thanks Anna, interesting you picked up on the word catering – I hadn’t put much thought into my use of it. I think the level of specificity and care mentioned is present, in individual interactions and members of staff going above and beyond because they care about all their students. It is higher up at the policy level that I think this care can appear to diminish, implementing policies that are one size fits all. You’re right though that often the people behind these policies can still be doing their best, but are tied down by additional responsibilities and not being able to change the framework within which they work, and may be trying to balance many things on their plate. This is almost like what I mentioned about technicians not having access to disability information about students – it’s an unfair expectation to expect each individual technician to be able to spot the learning difficulties, communication difficulties, neurodivergence and additional access requirements or adaptions needed for every individual student while working in busy workshops with multiple students and projects at a time. I am sure there are many ways we could be more accessible that we end up missing.