A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

sense of solidarity and purpose that can be gained from identifying with other disabled
people in challenging disabling barriers is an example of this.
I met Roshni in Glasgow on a Saturday morning in February 2009 to observe her facilitating
a meeting of a group of five young disabled Asian Glaswegian women. She had been
working as development worker with this group for about a year to raise disability
consciousness, and described the experience as something which motivated and excited her:
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...this particular project I thoroughly enjoy working on and I get a lot from it...
especially, you know, you wake up on a Saturday and it‟s the last thing you want to
do... come to work... but when I come to these meetings I feel that I get so much
from them in the sense that I feel that I‟m able to give a lot of myself... and
hopefully I‟m able to gain a lot as well from everybody else‟s experiences... and it‟s
in a different way to the way in which I interact in the other work that I do... because
I find that I‟m doing it because I need the money... because I have to pay my
mortgage... because I have to do boring things like that... whereas this piece of
work, yeah, I‟m getting paid for it but it‟s a lot more... it draws on my own passion a
lot more... (l.3:18ff.)
That Roshni found pleasure in this work did not signify that it was necessarily easy or
pleasant. In the meeting she and the women talked about the ways in which this group had
provided the first ever opportunity for some to talk about experiences of almost total
isolation, of humiliation, of voicelessness, of absence of control over life events:
,,,and in the process of doing that you uncover lots of instances of abuse in some
cases... emotional abuse or physical and sexual abuse... (l.3:61f.)
Roshni told me that there had been some women who had started to come to meetings but
had stopped because they had been:
simply not been able to handle it... because it‟s just such a leap in logic for them... in
terms of the kind of setting that they have come from... and that they‟ve experienced
all their life... (l.3:110ff.)
The intense negativity experienced by these young women meant a very long journey in
moving towards a more positive self-image. Among the issues identified by Roshni as
causing most difficulty in terms of trying to progress was the lack of vocabulary with which
to positively represent and talk about issues around impairment and disability: