All Wales People First Annual Conference 2016
// As ever, I love working with interesting people and there’s no finer bunch of human beings to spend time with than the members of All Wales People First.
This year’s conference was all about self-advocacy. To exercise, protect and fight for your rights, you need to know your rights. There were presentations and workshops looking at different aspects of self advocacy, such as the history of self advocacy in Wales for people with learning difficulties. Many people attending conference could very well have been institutionalised for most of their lives had they been around just a few decades ago.
Hijinx Theatre did a superb interactive performance exploring how knowing your rights and using them can empower you to make the choices that are important to you in your life.
The Photography Workshop
Alongside Anne Collis from BAROD, I ran a photography workshop which was a huge success thanks to the incredible enthusiasm and generation of ideas from all in the group.
It was a workshop with a twist. We started with a discussion on how people with learning difficulties are represented in images. We are used to seeing charity photos of people with their support workers or carers, who dominate the images with a big thumbs up or waving a collecting tub around. It creates a power imbalance, that presents people with learning difficulties as being looked after, child-like and not capable of doing things for themselves. How disrespectful and condescending.
We set about trying to decode a few images, and to understand what made some images strong and empowering and positive, whereas others made people with learning difficulties look dependent and ‘not normal’.
One thing that really struck a chord with me through my experience of growing up deaf was how deeply other people’s perceptions of disabled people are internalised by us. We too often see ourselves through other people’s eyes, and absorb the negative messages, stereotypes, low expectations and unnecessary limitations. Perhaps simply, because we haven’t been shown an alternative, nor been given an opportunity to work out who we want to be and how we want to be seen by others.
This workshop was such a brief opportunity to see how we can be represented in different ways and to begin to make choices about how we want to represent ourselves and to be seen by others. The top few images are a small sample from the workshop that represent the political and the personal expressed through photography. Ultimately, this was an exploration of the role of photography in self-advocacy and I’m just sorry that we didn’t have all day to spend on it.
