A NEW advertising campaign featuring celebrities Dame Shirley Bassey (pictured) and Barbara Windsor imagining what it is like to be blind has been slammed by a top blind academic.
Dr David Bolt, Associate Professor in the Department of Disability and Education at Liverpool Hope, says the RNIB’s new See the Need campaign is “negative to the extreme” and argues that it “couldn’t be more offensive to people who have visual impairments if it tried.”
In the campaign, Barbara Windsor says: “I’d hate not to see. I couldn’t bear that.”
Dame Shirley Bassey says: “If I couldn’t see the people, I could not imagine myself singing.”
While acknowledging that the campaign has been created for the right reasons – to help more hospitals provide a specially trained member of staff to provide practical and emotional support to patients who have just found out they are losing their sight – Dr Bolt adds: “My great concern is that this kind of negative portrayal contributes to the very desperation on which the new but nonetheless outdated See the Need campaign depends.
He adds, “As someone who’s been registered as blind for more than three decades and has written extensively on the subject, I find it simplistic and damaging to so reduce the experience to deficit.
“Rather than only seeing the need we should also get to know the great achievements and potential of people who have visual impairments.”
Dr Bolt is the Director of the Centre for Culture & Disability Studies in the Faculty of Education, where he also teaches Disability Studies and Special Educational Needs.
He is founding Editor in Chief of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (Liverpool University Press), co-editor of the book series Literary Disability Studies (Palgrave Macmillan), and has places on the editorial boards of both Disability & Society and the Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness.
Dr Bolt’s book The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability (Ohio State University Press, 2012) was recently reissued in paperback. He has also written The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-Reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing (University of Michigan Press, 2014) and is editor of Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability: Perspectives from Historical, Cultural, and Educational Studies (Routledge, 2014).
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