The Marketplace and I: Commercial Experiences of Disability Explored through Art
Aims
To improve access barriers to marketplace settings for consumers with disabilities by engaging public, industry, and governmental stakeholders.
Overview
The Marketplace and I (M&I): Commercial Experiences of Disability Explored through Art is a disability focused, art-based research project funded by The Marketing Trust and Lancaster University, undertaken by Dr. Leighanne Higgins and Dr. Killian O’Leary.
Beginning, in 2019, the M&I sought to prioritise disabled person’s abilities and worked actively with disabled persons from across the UK, asking them to develop artworks that represent their commercial experiences. It culminated in the development of 36 artworks exploring retail, hospitality, and tourism, and representing learning (autism), mobility (wheelchair users), and sensory (visual impairment) disabilities.
To date the M&I has been exhibited five times, both regionally and nationally, culminating in a two week exhibition at the internationally acclaimed Edinburgh Fringe Arts Festival. During the festival the exhibition received a four star review and was shortlisted for the Neurodiverse Review award.
Alongside this, the M&I has begun offering free accessibility training workshops to business and organisations wishing to improve their accessibility offerings.
Options available to business taking part include:
- Accessible Training: Offering innovative, art-based accessibility training sessions with employees.
- Accessible Audits: Outlining and advising on areas across company premises where changes can be made to easily and cost-effectively improve accessibility.
- Accessible Planning: Help with building/revising accessible plans.
- Accessible Information: Offering advice and support with how best to communicate accessible information and services to customers.
Results and Outcomes
Tab Content: For Partners and Engagement
Who did we engage with and how?
Since 2019, the M&I exhibition has been exhibited five times across the UK engaging with 1200+ stakeholders, encompassing companies, politicians, charities, policymakers and the wider public. Our exhibitions have proved highly successful in engaging public audiences.
Our accessibility workshops have engaged with and continue to engage with charities, companies, and NGOs, across hospitality, tourism, retail, and care sectors. Our use of the M&I artworks offers an innovative form of accessibility training, moving organisations away from traditional, ‘tick a box,’ and formulaic EDI training approaches.
How has it made a difference?
The collaborative ethos of the M&I is what makes it unique and innovative. Methodologically, our use of exhibitions has proven to be powerful in educating wider communities on disability issues and ableism. As one visitor shared, “I never realised someone who was disabled could paint”, then reflected “why did I think that?”. Often during the various exhibitions and training sessions we have conducted, people have been moved to tears by the artworks and their wider narratives - in short, by the experiences of disabled people in marketplace settings. The M&I envelops its audience in a well needed lesson of empathy, which helps foster true engagement and impact, as the audience comes away seeing disability in a new light. It is this potential to expose ableism and arouse empathy in wider society that makes the M&I an innovative exemplar of engagement, impact, and transformation. Likewise, our accessibility training workshops with companies moves organisations away from more traditional, ‘tick a box,’ formulaic EDI approaches, enabling them to innovatively rethink ways to better plan, develop and implement accessible strategies. The M&I prioritises the lived experiences of disability, bringing the realities and needs of those who are disabled to the forefront. In doing so it provides a useful case study of how innovative or alternative methodologies can be embraced by scholars in management schools but also organisations to further their accessible and inclusive agendas.
Testimonials
Visitor Testimonials:
“It’s made me think how often do I look down, how often do I see a person in a wheelchair … how often do I acknowledge people in wheelchairs and people who differ from the “norm” – whatever that is? The truth is rarely. You have opened my eyes to something here ... I came in for a browse and to get out of the rain (laughs), yet I feel I have had something of an epiphany or an awakening – so thank-you”.
Visitor to The Storey exhibition, Lancaster, Dec 2019.
"The exhibition was so moving, we just had to stop and have a hug and cry together after the tour, because it was so emotional, beautiful, eye-opening and thought-provoking - it's touched our souls".
Visitor to The Edinburgh Fringe exhibition, August 2022.
Company Testimonials:
“The Marketplace and I accessibility training was eye opening. It made our diverse team of staff, volunteers and trustees think about accessibility in alternative ways. Leighanne helped us see some of the simple improvements we could make within our charity to make our building more accessible. These things don't cost the earth but make a huge difference and being an accessible building is so important to us. We have used the training as the foundation of our new accessibility strategy that is being informed by the excellent training we received with Leighanne. Long term this will help us to unlock funding to make important changes in our building and most importantly ensure that the building is more inviting and welcoming for everyone in our community.”
Charles - The Gregson Community Centre Accessibility Workshop, October 2022.
“The artworks are powerful, thought provoking and something everyone should get a chance to experience. Hearing the stories behind each artwork really adds to the sense of understanding. The session has made me reflect on the issues covered and will definitely change the way I approach a few things in my role”.
Participant in Age Scotland Accessibility Workshop, June 2023.
“Fantastic training! Takes me out of an ‘able’ bodied mindset you see the world from many different views and showed me how small changes can make a massive difference to many.”
Helen – RSPB Leighton Moss Accessibility Workshop, July 2023.
“Thank-you to Leighanne and Killian. Accessibility can be so daunting, but you guys have made us realise how small changes can result in huge differences. We have also been enlightened by how difficult life can be for some. We feel honoured to be able to help”
Emma - Thornton Hall Country Park, July 2023.
Tab Content: For Academics
For Leighanne and Killian there have been several key learnings from the project:
Collaboration is key: A core success of our work is its collaborative nature – the project would never have gotten started without the collaboration and co-development with disabled communities and persons across the UK and they continue to support us still today. However, the M&I has grown now to collaborate not just with the artists but with countless charities, companies, and organisations. Thus, the initial narratives of the M&I artworks have become, and continue to be re-layered repeatedly with additional meanings, all of which adds to our impact case.
Patience is indeed Virtue: Timescales for impactful research are not immediate, they take time, and we are slowly having to acknowledge our need to be patient and allow the project to breath and guide us not the other way around. So being able, as researchers, to allow the research and the network you work with to lead you is quite a different role for researchers.
Be resilient and roll with the punches: There was an ill-fated business breakfast, which nobody turned up to! As two marketing lecturers that stung a lot, but it also taught us a hugely valuable lesson about the importance of networking and engaging with stakeholders and reinforced the importance of collaboration. We regrouped and drew on those around us and in turn they helped us gain access to companies that genuinely want to instantiate change and are already doing so after our training. Being resilient and prepared to learn from failure is something you need to embrace.
However, our key takeaway - impactful research is difficult and time consuming but it is also extremely rewarding and important – it has changed us both as researchers and as people. It’s not for everyone, but if you have the passion and genuinely want to change society with your research, please don’t let the difficult impact barriers stop you from journeying on this path because it is worth it!
What went well?
As the project has grown, it has naturally transformed and transmuted into avenues of understanding and endeavour that we could not have foreseen. The feedback from both the public during exhibitions, and businesses during training workshops, has consolidated how many of us have lived experiences of someone with a disability. What this has meant is that our training, the resources, knowledge, and advice we offer to business has been co-created and is constantly evolving. Immersive disability training sessions and an accessible resource pack for businesses are just some examples of the offshoots from our case so far. What is more exciting though is learning about the different thing’s organisations are doing following our training. For example, The Flower Bowl has begun offering more autism friendly cinema screenings and social events and have set up an accessibility steering group that works to promote accessibility. The Gregson is working with us to establish neuro-diverse quiet spaces and events in forthcoming festivals such as the Music Festival and Light Up Lancaster. RSPB Leighton Moss, are working with us to establish their own immersive training day where they will simulate disabilities as a means of understanding more concretely the barriers and being able to implement better routes, signage and experiences for customers going forward. These are just small, fast paced changes occurring a month or so after training. We cannot wait to see what these organisations do as the continue to work through their longer-term accessible plans.
What could have been done differently?
We could have done things differently, but everything we did led us to this point, and I think as we said above you need to allow the project and the network you collaborate with guide you, not you guide it. We’ve learned, reflected before and after events, interviews, exhibitions, and the project has grown naturally and for the better from it all.
One piece of advice we do wish we had when starting out, was to have a designated social media presence earlier in the journey. We are active on this now, but it would have helped in i) the promotion and building of the project brand earlier and ii) helped us better collate impact and engagement data as social media is a useful platform for reminding you of all the events you do!
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