Internet

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New Book: Disability Rights Advocacy Online – Out now!

I’m excited to announce that my book “Disability Rights Advocacy Online: Voice, Empowerment and Global Connectivity” was released in October 2016. Both hard back and e-book versions are available from the Routledge website, as well as on Amazon and other online vendors (where it’s cheaper!).

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Book cover: Disability Rights Advocacy Online

This book charts the recent digitalization of disability rights advocacy in the U.K. and the U.S., and discusses the implications of this transformation for disabled citizens and other traditionally under-represented groups. In just a few short years, disability rights groups have gone from using the Internet much less than other advocacy organizations to pioneering new uses of social media to foster a deep sense of agency and unify a very diverse community. To read a full book synopsis, click here.

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New Journal Article: Disability & Society

Disability & Society just published a new piece by myself and Charlotte Pearson (School of Social and Political Sciences/Institute of Health and Wellbeing, University of Glasgow) entitled “Disability Activism in the New Media Ecology: Campaigning Strategies in the Digital Era“. This work, which can be downloaded online ahead of print, explores the ways in which different disability activist groups in the UK are engaging with changing media landscapes in which both “new” and “old” forms of media interact to form public opinion and influence political decision-making. The paper focuses in particular on the case of the anti-welfare reform protests at the 2012 London Paralympic Games, in which self-advocates from Disabled People Against Cuts used both online and more traditional offline tactics to foster positive coverage of protest by traditional news media organisations.

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New Journal Article: Scottish Disability Organisations & the Internet

Hot off the press: my latest article on the use of online media among Scottish disability advocacy organizations in Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34 n. 3. Although online organising and campaigning have changed quickly in very recent years, this research, which was carried out between 2009 and 2010, asks fundamental questions about why advocacy group choose to adopt participatory technologies and how they try to manage them. In particular, I discuss the relationship between technological preferences and organisational ethos, structure and mission, which delayed the involvement of several prominent disability advocacy groups in Web 2.0 platforms in Scotland. To read the full text, click here (open access).

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Glasgow #SocialMediaAME materials available for download

My slides for the Glasgow Social Media Analysis, Methods and Ethics event are now available for download here together with all sorts of interesting materials from the other speakers. This was a great event that brought together  Glasgow-based researchers from a range of fields interested in all things digital for the first time. If you’re based in the West of Scotland and would like to keep up with Internet research carried out in this area, the organisers have set up a dedicated mailing list, click here to access.