(Stills on this page from Unbuilt Environments, 2025)
I’ve written an article for Artquest about the UK art sector’s perpetual and palpably fruitless diddling around on the edges of inclusion while precarious employment, decades of underfunding, a skewed class profile and the lack of sustainable ongoing support for practitioners perpetuates exploitation and patronising tokenism that sets different types of minoritised people against each other, forces them to perform their own oppression to get help, and makes real change highly unlikely. It’s not just a rant, there are some suggestions for fixes there too!
It was inspired by a recent experience I had where an arts organisation was guaranteeing interviews to disabled applicants who met the basic criteria, which I did, being in fact massively overqualified and over-experienced for a job I had done before and could do again with about half my brain capacity… until they got “too many” disabled applicants according to the director’s email to me when I complained. She then ghosted at which point they swiftly changed the wording of their advert and all other adverts retroactively without mentioning the alteration, so as to weasel out of the earlier commitment without admitting what they’d done. Lucky escape I guess, because working there would be a nightmare.
This is so common, incidentally, from my own experience and from disabled people I know trying to find work or stay in work, that the two options when you see “Disability Confident Employer” on a company’s literature are that they’re well meaning but totally deluding themselves, or they’re just virtue signalling liars. In neither case has a disabled person ever been anywhere near their policy or decision making processes. What a time to be alive.
(Update: I’m pleased to see a few stirrings of a new consciousness around this subject. I’ve seen some institutional documents and callouts that are mentioning meaningful progress and diversity as opposed to the performative kind that just looks good on an end of year report, or in a crude measurement of how many of “diverses” there are…)
Alistair Gentry 