UK Disability History Month celebrations at Kent
As part of UK Disability History Month 2019, we are hosting an exhibition in Keynes College about Mike Oliver, Kent alumnus and former lecturer, who was a key figure in the movement to secure equal rights for disabled people. The exhibition launch event will take place on Tuesday 26 November at 18.00 and is free to attend – book online via Eventbrite. It will showcase extracts of his work and personal affects kindly lent by Oliver’s widow, Joy Oliver, as well as the ways in which the University and Kent Union are trying to improve accessibility now.
The theme for this year’s Disability History Month is Disability: Leadership, Resistance and Culture. We will be asking our Kent community to engage with the exhibition and reflect on what our current culture and barriers might be, and what we can do individually and collectively to address these.
Who was Professor Mike Oliver?
Oliver studied for an undergraduate degree in Sociology and Social Anthropology from 1972 to 1975, at a time when the campus was widely inaccessible for a wheelchair-user. Mike Oliver completed his PhD in Sociology at Kent in 1979, and immediately moved to a position as Course Director at Kent for a new Masters programme aimed at Social Work professionals working with disabled people, which is believed to be the first postgraduate course in what later became known as Disability Studies.
Professor Oliver’s work examined the assumptions that disability was a medical problem, and shifted the focus away from illness and impairment and toward the allocation of resources. The medicalised model had created a label for disabled people as tragic victims, but Oliver’s assertion was that personal difficulties could be addressed as public issues, an insight that led him to develop the Social Model of Disability. The problem of gaining entry to a classroom is not because someone uses a wheelchair, but when that classroom is upstairs…a problem exists. Remove the stairs, and you remove the problem; this is the essence of the Social Model.
The Social Model of Disability has been widely adopted as the best practice model for public institutions, and is the best known theory of disability practice. As a disability activist he campaigned for the outlawing of discrimination against disabled people (Disability Discrimination Act 1995).
In 2018, Kent approached Mike Oliver to create an autobiographical film of his life, and his association with the University of Kent, ‘Kicking Down the Doors: From Borstal Boy to University Professor’, which premiered at Darwin Conference Suite during UK Disability History Month in November 2018. The film continues to receive very positive feedback and has been viewed over 3,800 times.
New Kent Student Award
The Kent Student Awards, which seek to recognise and celebrate the outstanding contribution students make to the Kent student experience, will launch a new award for 2020: The Mike Oliver Award for Improving Accessibility. We hope that the next generation of staff and students at Kent can pick up the mantle so inspiringly worn by Mike Oliver.