Abstract
Matthew Smith and Michael Ashley Stein explore through a discussion of Article 30—Participation in cultural life, recreation, leisure and sport, of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD 2006), how theatre can be used particularly by persons with intellectual disabilities to provide unique opportunities for (re)negotiating their rights-holder status with society at large and to politically engender and support the social transformative change promised by the CRPD. The chapter discusses how three theatre groups in Bangladesh, the United States and Switzerland, create spaces for dialogue that empower theatre performers with intellectual disabilities to convey political messages to their audiences. Smith and Stein argue that Article 30 if fully harnessed provides powerful opportunities for persons with intellectual disabilities and that human rights practitioners would do well to follow such theatre groups’ lead and direct more attention to the role of theatre in the CRPD’s implementation.
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Notes
- 1.
One of the ways in which the CRPD seeks to maximize law’s expressive effects is by expressly mandating disability rights education and awareness-raising activities (CRPD 2006, Art. 4(1)(i), 8, 9(2)(c), 13(2), 24(4), 25(d), and 32(1)(b)) which go above and “beyond monitoring and reporting on violations or top-down law-reform efforts” (Lord and Stein 2008, p. 457).
- 2.
Gonzalez (2016) helpfully explains these processes. Persuasion denotes when individuals “actively assess the content of a particular message—a norm, practice, or belief—and change their minds.” Acculturation, by contrast, occurs when individuals “adopt the beliefs and behavior patterns of the surrounding culture without actively assessing either the merits of those beliefs and behaviors or the materials costs and benefits of conforming to them.” For example, persuasion occurs when a training participant comes to believe that persons with disabilities have a right to inclusive education by virtue of the trainer’s explanation, whereas acculturation occurs when the same participant reaches an identical conclusion because she attended a school with inclusive classrooms. In other words, people may internalize the normative content of the CRPD either because of its intrinsic logic or because they have witnesses similar effects. Although a given activity may simultaneously utilize techniques of both persuasion and acculturation (e.g., a module led by a trainer with a disability as part of an inclusive education curriculum), persuasion depends on the substance of the activity’s underlying message whereas acculturation relies on the relationship between the target audience and another group. These processes describe macro-level mechanisms yet make intuitive sense when applied to individuals.
- 3.
- 4.
For example, the benefits of persons with disabilities’ participation in the workplace—including increased profitability, competitive advantage, inclusive work culture—are well documented (Lindsay et al. 2018).
- 5.
Although not framed in terms of expressive law, Louise Arbour, then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, announced the CRPD’s belief-change potential, averring “the Convention enshrines a ‘paradigm shift’ in attitudes” (Arbour 2006).
- 6.
Other examples are also instructive. Sunstein, for one, hypothesizes that restaurant owners backed passage of the United States’ 1964 Civil Rights Act because the law promised to convert refusals to discriminate on the basis of race into mere acts of lawfulness rather than provocative statements about racial equality, which would open them to retaliation from racists (Sunstein 1996). The sudden lawfulness of non-discrimination would legitimize it for citizens who “intrinsically value obeying the law” irrespective of its content (Cooter 2000, p. 1600).
- 7.
Of course, laws may just as easily have unintended expressive effects. For example, the Americans with Disabilities Act may have changed parents’ attitudes about children with Down syndrome, triggering a decline in birthrates of children with Down syndrome not otherwise explained by other technological, demographic, or cultural variables.
- 8.
Indicia of this intuition pervade the treaty text. However, Article 8 stands out as evidence of the drafters’ understanding of belief change’s behavioural ramifications. It specifically exhorts States Parties to engage actively in belief-changing activities, including by combatting negative stereotypes and promoting awareness of persons with disabilities’ capabilities and contributions.
- 9.
Amparo Directo en Revisión 989/2014, Primera Sala de la Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación (Mexico). Without opining as to whether the Mexican Supreme Court reached a “correct” result, its general shift away from its traditional non-discrimination heuristics towards less formulaic, morality-tinged criteria (e.g., stigma) suggests the CRPD’s expressive effects at work (Smith and Stein 2018).
- 10.
Similarly, artificial scenarios involving men and women have shown that men more inclined to insist on their preferred outcomes when told that the other scenario’s participants were women, suggesting how unstated, stereotypical assumptions operate in real-world situations (McAdams 2009).
- 11.
For example, the decision-making processes latent in Articles 12 and 19 CRPD, which require that persons with intellectual disabilities receive support to make decisions and decide on where and how they live, respectively, mandate some form of dialogue in order to establish persons with intellectual disabilities’ baseline preferences.
- 12.
Specifically, the CRPD’s global inclusion mandate not only guarantees persons with disabilities access to equal opportunities to travel, vote, earn, and learn, but also positions them to affect the beliefs of the others they encounter while doing so.
- 13.
Ineland and Sauer analyse a similar tension experienced by members of Olla, where workers play dual roles as both “artistic leaders” and “care givers” responsible for actors’ skills development (Ineland and Sauer 2007, p. 52).
- 14.
The eponymic “Boalian” denotes the vast, rhizomatic body of work inspired by the Brazilian Augusto Boal’s subversive and emancipatory pedagogy, first set out in Boal (1974), that delivers human rights education to marginalised groups through popular theatre.
- 15.
Participants’ stories “do not necessarily address oppression; they are as likely about cultural celebration and individual affirmation” (Cohen-Cruz 2006, p. 104).
- 16.
A tableau vivant, is the French term for a silent and motionless group of people arranged to represent a scene or incident.
- 17.
Other exercises allow persons with intellectual disabilities to develop strategies for combating the exclusion they experience. For example, in another Boal-inspired activity, the facilitator helps an actor confront prejudices she encounters in her daily life. Three group members are asked to deliver hurtful lines the actor herself has heard others say to her. She then selects a fourth group member whom she considers brave to play the role of “warrior.” The warrior confronts each of the three offending group members one by one and improvises a retort for each one. While the warrior confronts each one, the actor has her hand on the warrior’s shoulder. Then, the actor and warrior change places: the actor herself confronts each offending group member and repeats verbatim the retorts developed by the warrior, while the warrior follows her with his hand on her shoulder.
- 18.
Disability studies scholars differentiate between theatre that involves persons with disabilities and “disability theater” which consciously channels “impulses for social justice in the face of ableist ideologies and practices as well as a profound recognition of disabled lives and experiences as inherently valuable” (Johnston 2016, p. 25). “Disability theater” thus embraces a political and emancipatory agenda as “a cultural weapon to be wielded against the twin oppressions of mainstream culture and therapeutically aligned art” (Hargrave 2015, p. 27).
- 19.
And more recently, the Article 12 and 16 CRPD rights to make decisions and to be free from violence, respectively (SEID Trust 2017).
- 20.
The original Bengali-language script is reproduced as an appendix to SEID Trust and HPOD’s 2013 self-advocacy manual, on file with the authors.
- 21.
Despite Bangladesh’s 2007 ratification of the CRPD and subsequent positive ministerial directives and policies, the state’s 1990 primary education law still deems some children with disabilities as “unfit” for mainstream schooling. Compulsory Primary Education Act 1990 (Bangladesh). Available from http://bdlaws.minlaw.gov.bd/pdf/738___.pdf.
- 22.
Some audience members’ impressions are documented in the short film Oporajeyo, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a23Qvb7Ah1A&t=7s.
- 23.
Such recognition is of particular importance to these communities because some express their identity as members of a discrete cultural or linguistic minority—as “Deaf”—rather than as persons with disabilities, and all the connotations that inhere (Stein and Lord 2008, p. 180).
- 24.
The implications of Article 30(2) CRPD have also been underexplored even within the literature on Article 30 CRPD.
- 25.
Rule 10(1) provides in part: “States should ensure that persons with disabilities have the opportunity to utilize their creative, artistic and intellectual potential, not only for their own benefit, but also for the enrichment of their community, be they in urban or rural areas” (UNGA 1993, Rule 10(1)).
- 26.
Article 27(1)(a) of the Chair’s initial draft text provided: “States Parties recognize the right of all persons with disabilities to take part in cultural life and shall take all necessary measures to ensure that persons with disabilities … have the opportunity to utilise their creative, artistic and intellectual potential, not only for their own benefit, but also for the enrichment of their community[.]” Available from http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/enable/rights/wgcontrib-chair1.htm#27.
- 27.
Including the conceptualisation of ‘disability’ itself (Kayess and French 2008).
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Alex Geisinger for cogent insights into the workings of law’s expressive effects, Juliet Bowler for constructive feedback on the practice of Theater of the Oppressed, and Cathy James for incisive suggestions regarding Outside Voices Theater Company’s application of Theater of the Oppressed techniques.
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Smith, M.S., Stein, M.A. (2020). Article 30 of the CRPD as a Vehicle for Social Transformation: Harnessing the CRPD’s Potential for Persons with Intellectual Disabilities. In: Kakoullis, E.J., Johnson, K. (eds) Recognising Human Rights in Different Cultural Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0786-1_13
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