Dr Miro Griffiths talks heterotopias

What if there is no perfect world? Rather than work towards one ideal blueprint of the future, can we carve out worlds within worlds where we experiment with different ways of doing, being, and relating to one another? That’s what the concept heterotopia offers us, says disabled academic activist Miro Griffiths. In our conversation, we explored the worlds of activism, policy, and lovely back gardens. Read our edited transcript below, and join us TODAY at 2:30pm PST to delve into these worlds within worlds. Here’s the zoom link.

Dr Miro Griffiths is a Disability Studies scholar, based in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, at the University of Leeds. His research is associated – primarily – with understanding disabled people’s experiences of resistance, activism, social movement participation, and advocacy. His contribution to existing bodies of literature has progressed ideas and theories about power, resistance practices, and disabled people’s pursuit for liberation.

Sarah: The first question I've been asking all the lovely humans I've talked to is this: an alien lands on Earth and waddles up to you. How do you introduce yourself to this alien?

Dr Griffiths: I would probably say there are three aspects of my identity which are entangled. So one is as a disability studies scholar. Most of my work has been around ideas of disabled people's resistance, how and why they resist, and also how does resistance link to imaginations for better worlds? Another identity I have is as a policy advisor. I am not only interested in how we create effective policy for disabled people, but also policy that shifts seeing disability as an administrative burden on the state towards how to imagine policy which is much more conducive to building accessible and inclusive societies. I think the last part of who I am is my lived experience of disabilities. I have a physical impairment, and my experience of disability was politicized in my mid-teens. I realized that the problem is not me and my body. The problem is how society is organized. And that was quite a liberatory experience.

When a disabled person is seen as a problem then to fix that, your life is one of segregation or eradication. But, if you focus on how society is organized, not only do you have much more liberatory potentials, but you recognize the injustices and barriers people experience do not have to happen. That is true of many communities who experience injustice. But I think what you have with disabled people's lives is a kind of overt realization that actually you don't have to do things the way that we do; that we can do things very differently. And if they work for disabled people, they're most likely going to be able to work for many communities. At this point, I think the alien has probably run off, because he's realized that this was probably the wrong person he wanted to meet.

Sarah: Oh, I think the opposite! The alien might want to be part of your resistance! Speaking of resistance and liberation, I wonder if you could talk about what are you resisting? What are you trying to liberate from?

Dr Griffiths: This comes back to how we understand disability. When you start to understand disabled people's lives through a social justice lens, you recognize the disabled person is not the focal point of your attention. So when we talk about resistance, it's about situating resistance in the arrangements that constitute our societies, and that can be political, that can be social, that can be cultural, that can be economic, that can be technological. How do these arrangements produce unnecessary restrictions or barriers? I use the term arrangements because I’m less aligned with ideas of structures. Structures suggest a rigidity about how things are, whereas I think arrangements are much more liberatory.

“Because if you think that everything that we are experiencing, everything that we are processing, and everything that we come into contact with are being arranged, that means they can be arranged differently.”

It is constantly thinking about how the components of everyday life come together and within that, how is that producing marginalization or discrimination? Even within those arrangements that we may be feeling frustrated by, there is the potential to do things differently.

Now, when it comes to resistance, there are different ways we can think about resistance and power. A lot of my colleagues and activist friends think about power in a possessional sense. As in, you've either got power, or you haven’t got power. And then you'll have some sort of revolution where I'm probably gonna kill you, and then I'll take the power off you, and then I’ll have it. I think that's a really problematic way of viewing power.

Power is not a football that you kick between different people. Actually, power is a productive force, almost like electricity; it flows through the different arrangements and spaces that you've created.

Here, I am borrowing from the ideas of Michel Foucault. It was quite a liberatory moment in my thinking when I came across his idea that in order for power to exist, resistance has to exist first. So power can't exist unless resistance is recognized as being formed to power. So within that, it means actually there's always a possibility to resist. I think that's quite a powerful message for marginalized communities, but also for allies and people who want to think about doing things differently. That’s what this idea of heterotopia offers. It's about trying different arrangements out, which will create new tensions, new problems, but also new opportunities.

Sarah: I love how you conceptualize arrangements and power, it really resonates with our own sense of how limiting a lot of the current discourse around power is.

Dr Griffiths: If you think about the language of vulnerability, and the assumption that disabled people are vulnerable by default, that means from the outset, this group of people holds no power; they will always be dependent on others. What is quite fascinating when we start to untangle and unpack power is the way in which through their position, they can start to demand alternatives. And that might be through social claims that are made. It might be through people coming together to say in this service, we want things done differently. We’ve seen this with social movements that emerge.

Sarah: This concept, heterotopia, is probably a new word for a lot of people. Can you tell us more about this concept?

Professor Griffiths: I came to heterotopia in the last five years. I found it a useful way of thinking about the manifestation of space in order to experiment with ideas, and reveal the ways in which we've created certain types of worlds. I came to the concept after writing an article on disability activism producing utopia. So the idea of a better world that we're going to reach. I have a problem with utopia because I think it provides a very fixed idea that there’s a blueprint to get to a better world. There’s also forms of retrotopia, which is looking back to a previous world that you think is better. You see this on the political right and the Make America Great Again movement: the idea that a retrotopia exists that we must get back to.

Heterotopia is a way of trying to understand current worlds within worlds. They have the potential to be liberatory, but don’t have to be. For instance, prisons are a world within a world. Foucault also talks about the garden being a heterotopia. If I go sit in my garden, sometimes I forget that I'm actually living in a culdesac with 30 other houses around me. And the way in which I live in my garden, and the world that I create in my garden is completely different to anybody else's world. Yes, my neighbour might be naked in their garden while I'll be sitting in mine enjoying a cup of tea and listening to the bird songs.

What I was trying to argue in that paper is the idea that activism is a heterotopia because it’s trying to create a space to test out ideas. The important point is not to romanticize it, and think it's always liberatory, but that it's a space that can be established through the coming together of a few people. It can be the creation of an actual physical space, or an organization that's trying to disrupt things. The alternative that is born out of these spaces is the idea of of community support, self-determination, personal assistance and so on.

Sarah: What are some of the factors that you think determine whether a heterotopia reproduces dominant power relations or contests them? What enables one to be liberatory and another to be controlling?

Dr Griffiths: A lot of that comes from the way in which the the phenomena is understood. We should think about this in terms of the human and the non-human. If we take an institution, for example, an institution is reproduced through the existence of human beings who will continue the institutional practices, and it’s also maintained by the buildings and structures themselves. That is true for prisons. And also gardens. The loveliness of gardens has to do with the effect of the human and the non-human in those spaces. So we have to understand what affects a space, and what happens when the human and non-human come together. The important point of heterotopia is its a space for trying out things and testing things and being experimental.

This is why I am a bit dismissive of those who talk about the blueprint utopia approach, which is to say, if we don’t get there, we have failed. Or everything we do has to be tested against this one blueprint. I don't think that's helpful. I'd much rather say those who can shape the direction of travel, and those aspects and entities that can affect the travel of direction, are constantly coming together to work out what is possible. We can’t be trapped in thinking it has to achieve this one end point. It’s a much more floating, fluid understanding of the general direction of travel we’re trying to achieve, and having the opportunity to test ideas, to put in new claims, to see where it goes.

A lot of my research on disability youth activism talks about how young people were either dismissed or tightly confined in their activism. And what it meant is that a lot of their ideas were shut down, or their participation was closed. What so many of the young activists describe is the opportunity to express ideas, some of which will stick and some won’t, so they can be tested or scrutinized. And it's only through those experiences that you can then determine and reflect on what are we really trying to achieve. Do we need to start pivoting or creating new considerations in this process? And I think that, for me, is where the importance lies. It is not about creating a highly held structure of what you are trying to do. It’s more about saying, do we have a group of people who have some kind of commonality in what they want to do or see, and then we will express ideas, and we will nurture them, and look at what resources and infrastructures we can access to further what we are building.

Sarah: I love that how much of your language and our language overlaps. This is why we've tried to bring human centered design methods together with the social sciences. Because design has given us an understanding of how to prototype, iterate, and pivot. And we actually really struggle to give things structure because we find it can squeeze the space for learning. I'm curious, with your policy hat on, how do you design policy to enable this kind of experimentation? Policy is often trying to drive a particular outcome, and requires rationalizing your activities towards that. And so the fluidity that you're talking about feels quite antithetical to how policy tends to function.

Dr Griffiths: Yes. I suppose there's a few elements that probably need to be unpacked.

An integral problem of social policy is the way in which it creates the ideal subject, and then assumes that the ideal subject exists in order for the policy to be effective.

It does not account for intersectionality. It does not factor in the fluctuating nature of political, social, cultural, and economic dynamics. If you think abut disability policy, the way in which people with disabilities are positioned is really problematic for creating sustainable change. Social welfare regimes assume the purpose of supports for people with disabilities — and the supports they receive has to be this very tightly fixed categorization of things. It’s a problem that policy centres the ideal subject, rather than the phenomenon under attention.

So if you think about de-institutionalization. A lot of the focus of that policy is to get the disabled person out of the institution. But, then de-institutionalization fails because there isn’t an effective system outside of the institutions. You haven’t got support mechanisms. And you’ve got so many cultural issues you are not taking into account. The amount of times I went to places like Croatia to do de-institutionalization work, and it would fail in the first meeting because neighbourhoods would say ‘I support it, but I don’t want people living in my community.’ There’s big cultural issues there. So the problem is the policy doesn't tackle the broader context of the social issue that need to be unraveled. Instead it focuses on what will the person be doing.

There’s also a problem with evaluation of policy, as well. We are lucky if we even get a stage of evaluation into policy design. There's no mechanism of trying to actually have loops and periods of reflection that then influence the development or delivery of the policy. We don’t stop to ask: What is it that we're trying to achieve? Who are the key actors in this space? Where are the resources, or do we need to pivot? How do we know what is good?

And then there are question about representation as well. Where are the voices of people in these spaces? We know that the evidence shows that having community groups, having advocacy services, having peer support networks operating in a space where they can actually inform and influence the direction of travel is quite difficult. There is something about how to position the communities that are affected by the issue in a way where they feel that their voice is meaningful, but also that they can demonstrate the influence of their voice.

I get a little bit frustrated and annoyed when organizations or governments talk about participation or collaboration. They say we’re bringing in this group to inform our agenda and priorities. But, they don’t take into account that for the majority of people’s life, and also historically for their community, you told them that their voice doesn't matter. You've told them that their voice only matters when it is validated by a practitioner or family member. And now suddenly you are saying, you do matter and there’s an expectation that you're going to inform our processes? We have to think about how social policy grapples with all these complexities.

The point is there is no clear answer to how to do this, and there doesn't need to be, because it’s about having those spaces, those heterotopias, where we can try doing things differently. Some things will work and some won’t.

Often when we're talking about such complex social change, we see it's very easy to erode gains or regress. Whatever we work for in these spaces for liberation, inclusivity and accessibility, they're all temporary, because they will be facing new challenges, new context, new circumstances. So the idea is not to focus on the end point, but instead to look at what's the topic or theme we're engaging with, and trying to interrogate it, have spaces to come together, try things. You’re going to have high points, you are going to have low points, you are going to have regression, and disruption.

Q: That's beautiful, and speaks to our current experience where much of the funding for our prototypes has been pulled by government because of this period of fiscal austerity we are now in. And so we are asking: how do we find ways to keep learning and testing, even with the loss of such significant resources?

Dr Griffiths: Yes, I think what you often see in austerity or social & cultural tension is a compression of time and an acceleration of we just have to do something. And actually, what's lost is trying to understand the problem and space to try things. The conversations in the UK around welfare and benefits - we get so fixated on saving benefits, or cutting benefits. We don’t step back to ask: what's the point of welfare? What's the point of Social Security? I think that's why the work organizations like you do is about creating the space to say do we understand the problem? Are we creating a direction of travel? Take de-institutionalization again. The point of that is not to close institutions and get people out. Actually, it's about recognizing people have the right and the entitlement and the moral imperative for self-determination.

Sarah: I couldn’t agree more. And yet, in my conversations with policymakers lately, they are really walking back on ambition. Their focus is just on making sure shit doesn’t hit the fan. That seems to be the height of the aspiration.

Dr Griffiths: The idea of the alien analogy is quite useful here. If an alien came and tried to understand life today on Earth, it would see this desperate need for people to survive. But actually an element of existence is the opportunity to thrive and flourish. Survival is a basic instinct. It’s the foundation, but it’s not the point of social policy.

A fixation on survival moves us away from a broader direction of creating opportunity. When we're talking about marginalized communities, in particular, it’s about how do you create an infrastructure where people feel that they have the necessary support to live AND find meaning & value in their life?

That, of course, will contribute to the productiveness of society, if people are focused on production.

Sarah: One thing I’m curious about. You talk about the independent living movement as a heterotopia. But, that assumes quite an individualistic lens. The language of independent living feels rooted in individualistic ways of thinking, rather than relational ways of thinking that acknowledge we’re always in relationship. What’s interdependent living?

Dr Griffiths: That’s such an important point in our discussion. There’s a historical reason why disability activists used the language of independent living because they had come from a world of assumed dependency and passivity. But in reality, when you look at the principles of independent living as articulated by disabled people's movements, you realize actually what they were talking about was interdependency. It was about having agency in your life, but also recognizing the constant need for support. In many ways disabled people are the purest example that there is no such thing as being independent.

When I teach disability politics, I'll say to somebody, can you show me anybody in the history of the world who has truly been independent? Because you can’t. Even sitting here now talking to you, we are relying on technology, which is created by people. We're sitting within spaces that were built by people. So you know that everybody is constantly interdependent. What is quite revealing is the way in which Independent Living has become corrupted over time, where the focus is now all on self-sufficiency. This goes back to the problem of social policy and the ideal subject who has total self-sufficiency. Nobody actually has that. I think the independent living movement is a fascinating example of showing how all the things that we've been talking about in terms of assumptions, the corruption, the assumed purpose, but also the possibility for resisting that and creating ideas of interdependency and recognition of collective support is so integral to what we're trying to achieve.

Sarah: Thank you so much for making the time for this conversation. It's really sparked some thinking for me, and helped validate some of our ways of making sense of what we do and why. Last question: what are you working on at the moment?

Dr Griffiths: Oh, gosh. I’ve just finished four years of working on a project looking at disability youth activism, and I'm just now finally writing the book that collects all of those thoughts. And then I’m working on a book about the complexity of assisted dying. It’s a disability studies critique of the topic.

Sarah: I can’t wait to read them! Thank you so much for your generosity with your time and ideas!