Interview and article by Binks Hub student intern Brigid McCormack as part of our series on human flourishing, following our human flourishing symposium in June 2023.
Artists often seem to have some kind of magical ability to create pieces of work that express feelings and effect change where words can fail. Leighanne Higgins, Senior Lecturer in consumer research and curator of The Marketplace and I: Commercial Experiences of Disability Explored through Art, explains that, when artistically expressed, the experience of the disabled community in the marketplace can both be understood and cause waves of emphatic growth and inclusion that leads to an inclusive human flourishing.
"We're all vulnerable"
Consumer research often neglects much of the population, focussing on the 15% that are male, white, and educated. “The other 85% quite often have less of a voice or less of an understanding within consumer research,” Leighanne says. This neglected group includes the disabled community, who are often an afterthought in marketplaces.
Vulnerability has a two-fold nature: there is perceived vulnerability and actual vulnerability. Leighanne explains this further: “You know, you look at a disabled person who is a wheelchair user and the automatic assumption is ‘Oh, well, they’re vulnerable’. But actually, when they’re moving around in their wheelchair getting from A to B, they’re not vulnerable. It’s different socio-environmental barriers that will make them [vulnerable].”
The disabled community, once categorised as vulnerable, often fade into the background of social spaces. Leighanne shares a story about her research informant, a wheelchair user, who often feels ignored or misunderstood in social spaces that aren’t considerate of those with disabilities:
“She is perceived socially vulnerable as a wheelchair user but it’s only at intermittent times that she feels truly vulnerable or is actually vulnerable herself.
“And we all – regardless of who we are, what we are, what we have – transition in and out of vulnerability at different times.”
Expression through art
In 2016, Leighanne began to look at access barriers more closely for those with disabilities that exist within the marketplace. At that time, she volunteered as a carer for disabled people with complex needs. This, Leighanne recognises, actually made herself vulnerable and placed her outside her comfort zone.
“What I learned most from [volunteering] is that all we ever focus on, socially and culturally, is what people with disabilities cannot do. We never focus on what they can do. We always focus on the ‘dis’ part and not the ‘ability’ part.”
While volunteering, Leighanne noticed many of the people who she cared for created art. “The people I cared for and met were maybe unable to walk, talk, or feed themselves but they could paint using their heads, they created photography, [and] they wrote poems and short stories.”
This transformed Leighanne’s perspective on what it means to be disabled and what it means to exist within disability. “I thought how wonderful it would be if we could encapsulate their experiences through the way that they express their sense of self, which was for so many of them was through their art, through their stories, through their poetry.”
The Marketplace and I
Fuelled by her newfound understanding of the disabled community, Leighanne began a mission to create an arts-based research project where people with disabilities were able to represent their own marketplace and commercial experiences through art.
Under the title The Marketplace and I: Commercial Experiences of Disability Explored through Art, song, dance, poetry, painting, sculpture, and installations were made by people with all different disabilities.
“[Art] is a way of hearing and understanding this group that’s so often unheard”, Leighanne says with a smile. With no predisposed requirements, style, or medium, the artists were free to create whatever they desired and express their experience as a disabled person in the marketplace. “And it could be the good, the bad, the ugly. We’ve got a little bit of everything in there. We’ve got some really positive experiences and some really negative experiences”.
In December of 2019, The Marketplace and I held its first public exhibition and represented many artists with a wide range of disabilities, from those with neurodivergence to those with mobility and sensory disabilities.
Presented at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2022, The Marketplace and I touched hearts and shifted the mindsets of the 400+ people that came across the exhibition. “It stripped down a lot of their perceptions and changed a lot of their perceptions toward disability, I think in quite an emotive and emphatic way”, Leighanne says reflectively.
The magic of art
Throughout The Marketplace and I’s existence, Leighanne, her colleagues, and the artists were witnesses to countless changed hearts and minds when observing the visitors who popped into the exhibition.
“You start to see a deeper transformation in terms of the way that they’re like, ‘Ah, I didn’t think someone with a disability could create something like this,’ and then you can see them almost thinking at times quite often, ‘wait, why did I think like that?’ The magic of that is because it’s art – it’s a good leveller.”
Art cuts across all mediums, styles, and techniques; it’s not scolding or guilt-inducing. Instead, art invites a passerby in and asks them to observe what is presented. Through this observation, people are able to emotively experience what life is like for the artist living with a disability.
“I think [this research] has the potential for transformative human flourishing in that it can get people to think a little bit differently”. Even the smallest ripple of deeper understanding and empathy in a few people’s hearts can create waves of change that transform practices across consumer research and marketplaces.
When rooted in vulnerability, art has the transformative power to change hearts and minds, clearing a path for a greater human flourishing.
Leighanne Higgins is a Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University. Her areas of focus surround consumer vulnerability and transformative consumer research, looking for ways consumption experiences can be transformed to create better equity within society and more specifically the marketplace.
