Scroungers & Superhumans:
Images of Disability from the Summer of 2012:
A Visual Inquiry

Abstract:

Through the summer of 2012, two opposing sets of images dominated
the British press. Welfare benefits reform met the Paralympics,
the former casting disabled people as scroungers, the latter as
superhumans. Seemingly independent yet intertwined, the images
create a collective picture in the mind of what it is to be disabled.
This collective imagining shapes and reinforces government policy on
austerity cuts and benefits reform, with profound influence upon the
everyday lives of disabled people. Caught between the two conflicting
image sets, disabled people’s real lives are rendered invisible, even
as they feel the full force of the images. This visual inquiry examines
how the dominance of such images might practically be contested
by creating counter images which reveal a very different and more
truthful imagining of what it might be to be disabled.