Resistance:
Transforming the Future

Chair of session: It’s a real pleasure to introduce Liz Crow who will give the final Plenary of the day: Resistance: Transforming the Future.

Liz is a Writer/Director who has worked in film and audio and text, but in the 90s, Liz just then had written what I thought was a very, very important paper, Including All Our Lives, and it was very influential on me and a lot of us who work in disability studies. She has moved from writing and academia to doing performing art and doing video, audio and text and she works in drama, life stories and experimental work. Her work has been shown in the Tate Modern, and she has had a NESTA Fellowship.

Liz: Fifteen years ago, I read a book ‘By Trust Betrayed’ by the disabled academic Hugh Gallagher in the States. This was a book about Aktion-T4, the Nazi programme of mass murder targeted at disabled people. The first thing that struck me about that book was how in all my years’ involvement in the disabled people’s movement, how had I never come across the history before?

And apart from the very obvious horror of what I was reading, there were two other things that really stayed with me from that book. The first was that the values that underpinned Aktion T4 felt alarmingly familiar; the ideas about disabled people that permitted all of that to happen felt very contemporary. The other thing that really hit me very powerfully was a very short part in the book that talked about people who resisted, including disabled people. At the time somebody said to me, ‘Well, you know, at that point what did people have to lose? Of course they resisted.’ And I think things can always be made worse and the courage in people who resisted in whatever way they could was extraordinary. Imagine being in an institution and being dependent, being made dependent, on the staff for your basic needs, those very same people who were going to be loading you on to a bus to go to a death centre. Trying to resist in those conditions was just, well, awe-inspiring.

At the time, I knew I needed to do something with what I had read. I didn’t yet know what and, like a lot of my projects, it’s taken years to percolate. Eventually I decided I would work on something I have since called the Resistance project…