Obituary

The Executive Editors decided to invite John Davis, a close friend of Mairian, to write the following obituary:

Mairian Scott Hill (mainly published as Mairian Corker) Died 22 January 2004 Aged 51 Years

The disability world was saddened to learn of the death of Mairian Scott Hill in January. Mairian was an executive editor of Disability and Society and a senior research fellow at King's College London. She had previously been editor of Deaf World, a freelance consultant to a number of projects/organisations and a senior research fellow at the University of Central Lancaster.

The central aim of Mairian's work was to analyse and make more explicit the diverse and complex identities of disabled people. She was particularly critical of the male dominated technical rational approach to disability studies that perpetuated gender stereotypes and overemphasised binary opposites (such as structure/agency, reason/emotion, presence/absence, universalism/relativism). She argued that rigid social model perspectives were often promoted by less analytical colleagues who misunderstood the importance of issues such as experience and ‘sensibility’ (by which she meant: the set of individual and collective dispositions to emotions, attitudes, and feelings that are relevant to value theory, including ethics, aesthetics and politics). However, this did not mean that she rejected the social model of disability or was in favour of all feminist thought. She preferred to employ the social model as a useful tool and starting point for a more interesting and critical analysis of disabled people's lived experience. Similarly, she valued the work of a number of feminists yet was highly critical of their lack of engagement with disability studies and their tendency to simplistically represent disabled women's experiences as double discrimination. Her alternative perspective called for a feminist theory of disability. One that explains how bodies—marked by gender and by disability, by impairment and sex, among other things—are formed in, created by, and acted upon by society, and also act within and impact on society.

It was fitting that Mairian primarily owed allegiance to three academic disciplines (Deaf Studies, Disability Studies and Discourse Studies) because these multiple ties in themselves demonstrated her own complex identity. Indeed, this complexity was also revealed in the way she described herself as a: deaf, feminist, linguist, philosopher, experienced at working in both statutory and voluntary sectors, with a history of scholarship and political activity in both the deaf and disability fields. Mairian brought together her knowledge of deaf studies and disability studies in her third book, Deaf and Disabled or Deafness Disabled (1998, Open University Press).

In this deeply enlightening book Mairian argued that Deaf and Disabled people needed to find a common discourse so that they could work together in challenging oppression. She consistently believed and argued that only by seeking collective empowerment and joining together in ways that valued disabled people's diverse identities could a movement be forged to address the power imbalances at the heart of disability oppression.

Though coming to academia later in life, Mairian was a prolific writer. Between 1994 and 2004 she published four single authored books and two co‐authored edited collections (in the main her late entry to the field was due to her career being restricted by discrimination that she encountered in educational settings). She was also the author of numerous journal articles, book chapters and distance learning materials. Her high production of written pieces owed much to the enthusiastic support that she received from her partner Janet Hill (who died aged 58 in September 2003). Janet and Mairian met whilst working at City Lit in London. When Mairian became disillusioned with City Lit and her early experiences within Deaf Studies, Janet encouraged her to move on to new projects and subsequently accompanied her to a number of disability conferences.

Mairian often experienced disabling barriers within work settings. These experiences and her single‐minded independence led her to carry out a number of projects as an independent consultant. This work included research on The University of Edinburgh and University of Leeds ESRC funded project ‘Life as A Disabled Child’; Policy development for the British Deaf Association Education and Training Advisory Committee Executive; and Course development with the Scottish Sensory Centre. Many people found Mairian ‘difficult to work with’. She explained this experience from her own perspective in one of her last papers to be published (‘Collectivising experience and rules of engagement: close(d) encounters in disability research’, in C. Barnes and G. Mercer, Implementing the Social Model, 2004, The Disability Press) suggesting that when people imposed their own orthodoxy in workplace settings, the collective need to maintain consensus often led dissenting voices, such as her own, to be marginalised. She went on to suggest that good work experiences could be created where the collective consensus enabled space for the recognition of difference (particularly impairment related differences and cultures e.g. ‘deaf culture’).

In short, when Mairian encountered work colleagues who possessed sufficient reflexive skills to enable her cultural and linguistic diversity to be recognised and legitimised, she and they found it easy to develop fruitful dialogue and to overcome the deaf–hearing divide. Unfortunately, throughout her career Mairian encountered too many work colleagues who completely lacked basic knowledge of both reflexivity and disability equality. This led her to argue that unless critical theory is matched with critical response, institutionalised inequality will be perpetuated.

Importantly, Mairian was not made bitter by her experience but utilised them as fuel to drive her writing. Moreover, through the disability‐research mail base she was able to use her own experiences to support others—particularly PhD students and researchers starting out on their careers in Disability Studies. That these people held Marian in very high esteem is evidenced by the numerous tributes posted on the mail‐base following her death.

Mairian was very generous to colleagues and friends in disability studies and this included support and encouragement to many newcomers on the disability studies scene. She was always keen to discuss ideas and to make her arguments with passion.

Mairian's early works were very practical pieces of writing and defy the stereotype that suggests her work is too theoretical and inaccessible. Counselling—The Deaf Challenge (1994, Jessica Kingsley) is a unique book that has been employed as a key resource by a wide variety of professionals, both deaf and hearing, who work with deaf people. It provides them with an in‐depth window on to the lives of deaf people and is essential reading for counsellors and other professionals. Deaf Transitions (1996, Jessica Kingsley), examines the experiences of deaf people in the family and community context. It analyses how deaf people construct their ‘identity’ and how this relates to the world they live in. It is particularly informative concerning the life transitions that deaf people make and recognises the capabilities of deaf people in a way that contests taken for granted stereotypes and promotes the recognition of their individual and cultural diversity. It also gives particularly precise advice on how Deaf people can be supported within creative learning environments such as “Centres of Excellence” in the tertiary sector:

It is envisaged that training programmes will be implemented in all departments, which will include awareness and knowledge of the Deaf community and its unique language. Our will is to ensure that the Disability Resource Office, the health and counselling Centre, and the Students' Learning Centre, as well as other student centres and various departments, have culturally safe environments for Deaf and hearing‐impaired students. This would be ideal. However, it seems that funding issues will prove this difficult. We must remember, though, nothing is impossible. Who knows, we may achieve this over the next few years.

Mairian was keen to highlight the power imbalance that deaf children, young people and adults experienced within educational settings and to encourage others to recognise the subtle and not so subtle practices (e.g. a lack of truly bilingual teachers, lack of clarity of education law and a lack of clear pre‐school policies) which enabled the hearing teacher/lecturer to maintain their authority over the deaf student.

Following the publication of Deaf and Disabled or Deafness Disabled in 1998 Mairian produced a number of papers that were published within the Disability Studies field. She wrote a number of practical policy‐based papers that criticised the way that the legal system in England and Wales treated disabled adults and children. She argued that there is little mention of the rights of disabled children in the various books about children and the Law; that the dominant discourse in Law views disabled children in terms of dependency, vulnerability and protection; and that Law in itself is very often individualising and dehumanising. She also demonstrated that despite some cases of good practice, local interpretations of the law and policy result in widespread abuses of the human and civil rights of disabled children and the silencing of their voices, rendering them ‘invisible under the law’. These papers complemented later papers that she wrote in order to compare disability law in the UK and the US. Indeed, more and more, as Mairian's career progressed, she established her work outside of the UK, particularly in the US and Australia. The disability‐mail base enabled Mairian to develop connections with academics in other countries and to contribute to journals and edited book collections published outside of the UK. Mairian drew on these connections when editing (with Sally French) Disability Discourse (1999, Open University Press).

This book asked key questions such as:

	Why has ‘the discursive turn’ been sidelined in the development of a social theory of disability, and what has been the result of this?
	How might a social theory of disability which fully incorporates the multidimensional and multifunctional role of language be described?
	What would such a theory contribute to a more inclusive understanding of ‘discourse’ and ‘culture’?

Mairian and Sally argued that we needed to move beyond the materialist emphasis on the importance of frameworks and structures and recognise the central role of language in social phenomena. They indicated that there had been a ‘linguistic turn’ in social theory yet within Disability Studies little attention had been paid to analysing the role of language in the struggle and transformation of power relations and the engineering of social and cultural change. The book drew upon personal narratives, rhetoric, material discourse, discourse analysis, cultural representation, ethnography and contextual studies. It sought to emphasise the multi‐dimensional and multi‐functional nature of disability language in an attempt to build links between disability studies and more contemporary mainstream social and cultural theory. This aim was particularly achieved in the chapter by Mike Oliver that suggested that there might be more than one social model of disability

In this book and her earlier book that linked deaf and disability studies we see Mairian's motivation for writing. Having experienced isolation and discrimination within the workplace because of a lack of understanding of deafness by disabled and non‐disabled people, Mairian was driven by an ambition to break down the barriers between subject disciplines. This aim may also have related to failures experienced within her first chosen subject area of Biology where a lack of awareness of deaf culture and access issues created barriers to the successful completion of a PhD.

Though Disability Discourse was criticised by activists in the disability movement on the basis that some of the articles were too academic it is an important book as the chapters that analyse social theory in relation to identity, dialogue and discourse created the foundation for future work, particularly Disability and Post Modernity (with Tom Shakespeare, 2002, Continuum).

Mairian combined her knowledge of Disability and Discourse Studies to develop a postmodern perspective in a number of journal articles and book chapters. She argued that Disability was probably the last remaining dimension of social inequality to receive the critical attention of an applied linguistics. She believed that language is too often viewed in ways which distract from its ability to perform disability and ignore a quiet revolution in language change which has seen the production of new speech genres and registers. Using texts of disabled young people taken from ethnographic research, she illustrated how discriminatory language—and resistance to it—are played out in disabled young people's social space in a variety of highly creative ways. She was particularly keen that colleagues in Disability Studies recognise that sociolinguistics have an important role to play in identifying which linguistic practices ‘wound’, why and how. Of particular importance to her was Bakhtin's notion that to speak or to write is always essentially dialogic. The introductory chapter to Disability and Postmodernism enabled herself and Tom to develop their theoretical perspectives and to analyse particular dimensions of audience, disability, feminism and post‐structuralism in an attempt to explore the social organisation of disability discourse.

In Disability and Postmodernism Mairian and Tom differentiated between postmodern and post‐structural writing and suggested that there were at least four forms of postmodern writing: radical postmodern writing, the psychoanalytical intervention, ‘performativity’ and post‐structural writing. They described radical postmodern writing as that which builds on Lyotard's idea that there are multiple local knowledges and Baudrillard's position that there can be no ontological and epistemological truths. They argued that Radical postmodernism challenged the authority of traditional meta‐narratives such as those concerning socialisation or the medical model and advanced a less certain, confused, ambiguous, ahistorical standpoint from which to understand the social world.

The second form of postmodernism that Mairian and Tom identified was a psychoanalytical intervention within sociological writing that suggested that people hold diverse fragmented notions of identity in their unconscious. They explained that such writers believed that self‐knowledge had been fractured by changes in society and that ‘human subjects’ had found it difficult to locate themselves in social networks. They explained that this way of writing concentrated on the individual and internal aspects of the crisis of legitimacy discussed in radical postmodernism.

The third form of writing they identified as postmodern was ‘performativity’. They argued that ‘performativity’ had its roots in feminist writing that promoted the theory that social agents constitute reality through social practice. They suggested that this form of writing linked the material and social to argue that we should recognise a plurality of identities that people enact. Its aim was to move away from the deterministic notion of identity and culture as a ‘biological stamp’ (e.g. in childhood studies the idea that children are a rigid cultural grouping because they are biologically/developmentally different from adults).

This theoretical perspective replaced fixed notions of culture with the idea that bodily practice was both enabled and restricted by biological, psychological, cultural and social issues. For example, they suggested that women's bodies could both be the site of oppression and liberation and that we should recognise a diversity of women's lived experiences. ‘Performativity’ was closely related to their final form of postmodern writing which was post‐structuralism:

Post‐structuralism provides a different view of the subject, arguing that subjects are not the autonomous creators of themselves or their social worlds. Rather, subjects are embedded in a complex network of social relations. These relations in turn determine which subjects can appear, where and in what capacity. (Corker & Shakespeare, 2002, p. 3)

Mairian argued that disability studies had been reticent to explore postmodern theory and that mainstream postmodernism had all but ignored disability studies. She was highly critical of writers in disability studies who failed to recognise the different forms of postmodern writing and who stereotyped postmodernism in an outlandish and misleading way because they feared it would challenge their own orthodoxy (e.g. neo‐Marxist, historical materialism). Mairian delivered this criticism (especially of those she called ‘the old guard’) with considerable humour because she knew that very often in private and at conferences members of the ‘old guard’ argued in a post‐structural way without necessarily realising it. On a serious note she also recognised that some forms of postmodern thinking caused concern for activists, because they possessed the potential to undermine the social model. She was keen to avoid this eventuality because she recognised that the social model had been an extremely effective tool for fostering collective action. Contrary to popular belief among activists, Mairian's work aimed to strengthen the basis for political action by (in Gramscian terms) promoting the role of ‘organic intellectuals’. She believed that disability studies and disabled activism should always be interconnected. For example, she like others argued that disability studies courses should enable students to go on to work more effectively to promote social change. What set her out from more traditional writers in disability studies (as has been explained above) was that she believed that disabling practices could be confronted in a variety of ways—not only at the structural level. Her belief stemmed from the conviction that by recognising the diversity of disability identities we could strengthen the collective, increase the numbers of people who were active members of the disability movement, develop more creative responses to confront disabilist practices, increase our ability to contribute to the self‐emancipation of disabled people and further promote the development of more inclusive societies. Her belief that this was possible was built on her experience of seeing real changes within the UK and abroad and her own self‐emancipatory experiences achieved within her lifetime.

John Davis, University of Edinburgh