Hetty Blades

We held our second Advisory Group meeting on 7 December. Despite the rather predictable technical problems when connecting from Scotland, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Germany and the UK, we had a very productive and thought provoking meeting.

We started with a presentation outlining how we conducted the first part of the fieldwork. We explained the structure and focus of the workshops in June and July, VisAbility’s subsequent coaching sessions, and how we went about capturing people’s experiences. Some of the methods used for doing this didn’t work as well as others, so we spent some time discussing methodology. We then outlined our preliminary findings, including positive results regarding mobility and self-esteem as well as increases in self-efficacy and rights awareness among some participants. These results were gathered before, during and directly after the workshops. As we explained to the group, our task now is to gauge whether these positive outcomes have been maintained over the past five months.

We then opened the (virtual) floor to the Advisory Group who asked some really helpful and challenging questions, ranging from our plans for sustainability to the focus of the rights workshops. One important question that arose is how we might demonstrate the link between dance and legal empowerment: were the positive outcomes we observed the result of dance, rights-awareness, or the combination of the two? This is an ongoing question for us and one that has shaped and re-shaped the methodology throughout the project to date. Another question arising from the discussion is whether the disempowerment that participants face is a result of their disability, or to do with the larger political and social-economic situation. Both these questions highlight how a control group, and/or working with a greater number of people without disabilities would have deepened the research. Whilst we had hoped to have more non-disabled participants in the research, we were not able to recruit as many people as we would have liked. Nevertheless, these questions have really helped us to think about how we approach the next round of fieldwork in December and January.