A Quick Dip into Inclusive Communication with Sara Thornhurst

How often do we, as communicators, really consider the breadth and diversity of the people we’re communicating with?  In this Quick Dip we talk to Sara Thornhurst about how inclusive communication can help organisations to reach and include more diverse audiences.

Sara Thornhurst is a disabled PR practitioner and trainer who ran her own agency for several years. She has been speaking out about disability in PR since 2016 and has run workshops on disability inclusion, accessibility and diversity issues at multiple industry events and is an experienced public speaker and activist. 

She offers PR consultancy with an EDI focus and runs regular training sessions and workshops for agencies and PR events to help them overcome issues around ableism, and employing and retaining disabled talent. 

She is also the Chair of the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire CIPR Committee and a member of the CIPR’s Diversity Inclusion Network.

In this podcast you’ll find out: 

• How pervasive ableism is in our language
• Why people with disabilities should not be treated as inspirational heroes
• How organisation wide reasonable adjustments benefit everyone 
• How the Social Model of disability can help to change entrenched ways of thinking about disability.

Connect with Sara: You can follow her on LinkedIn, Twitter and read more about her work on her website. 

Thank you for listening! 

A Quick Dip is about starting conversations. If you’d like to share your thoughts, keep the conversation going, and ask questions you can connect to Sarah on LinkedIn. 

Resources:

The Social Model of Disability - Scope

Chartered Institute of Public Relations - EDI Basics

Disability News Service

The Unwritten

Disability Visibility Project and books

“I’m not your inspiration, thank you very much.” - TED Talk by Stella Young

Sarah: Hi everyone, welcome to a quick dip, a series of short conversations about culture, communications, and change. I'm Sarah Black, founder of Athru Communications. I'm the communication strategist who is passionate about making sure you're not endlessly creating comms content. You're actually starting conversations that matter to your organisation.

And that's what this podcast is about. It's a series of conversations, introducing ideas to help make your communications activity more culturally relevant, more inclusive, and more effective.

I am delighted to welcome Sara Thornhurst this week for a quick dip into inclusive communication. Sarah, say hi and introduce yourself to everyone.

Sara: Hi. Thank you so much for inviting me on your podcast. So, just to give a bit of background about me is I am a professional communicator. I am also a disabled person, and I have had hearing loss pretty much all my life really.

So over the, kind of the last six years, I've really been kind of campaigning to bring disability to a wider audience, particularly like disability and pr, disabled PR practitioners, um, and look at how the industry can be more welcoming, more inclusive, and more supportive of MD with a disability, chronic illness or impairment working in the PR and comms sector.

Sarah: Amazing thank you, and I will just love that Sarah does great training for anybody who's already rushing to learn more about this. Sarah, I want to talk a little bit today about, as mentioned, inclusive communication. What do we mean, when we talk about inclusive communication, what does that mean to you? What are you talking about when we use that phrase?

Sara: So for me it means being deliberate and thoughtful in the language that we choose to use, to make sure that it doesn't exclude people, but also that it does not contribute to upholding systemic barriers and oppressions for marginalised groups so it's really about thinking about the words that we use, where they come from, the style of language that we use, who we include in our communications, like demographics, for example.

What do they look like and how are we talking about them? And what do we think of when we are putting a campaign together as our, as our target audience, and who, how do we talk to those people? So inclusive communication is really thinking of all these different factors about any kind of communication that we put out into the world, and trying consciously to make sure that it excludes as few people as possible.

And I say that cuz I think it's, it's impossible to cater to everybody all of the time. It's quite hard, I appreciate that. But I think making a concentrated effort, as I said, to make sure that we are minimising that as much as possible and not contributing to the pillars of like racism, ableism, patriarchy, white supremacy.

All these kind of things.

Sarah: And I'd love you to talk a little bit more about how ableism can show up because I think one of the things I've learned from you is how hyper pervasive it is and sometimes how unaware as non-disabled people are of it.

Sara: Yeah, I think it's an interesting one cause I would argue that everything is ableist. And I think I say that because, well, I say that because not to have a go at anybody. I think a lot of people, a lot of times when you say things like that to people, they take it really personally, go, I'm a good person. I'm not, I'm not ableist.

And what I mean is that society in general, particularly in the global north, is ableist because of all the things that we've learned over hundreds of years about disability and disabled people, it is pervasive and it's in the language that we use. I mean, um, one of my last training courses, I covered inclusive language and I covered things like we say mad and we say crazy and we say all that's insane all the time.

Those are terms that were used to describe people who had severe mental health issues and who were maybe institutionalised in the past. Like that's where those words come from but we use them every day and we don't join those two things together so we don't see it as ableist, but it really is, and I think we don't understand disability well enough because it hasn't been in the public eye, I guess, well enough. Mm-hmm. So it's always been, the narrative is of, of disabilities has always been controlled by non-disabled people until really the last 20, 30 years. So everything that we think and all the ways that we act and we exist in society are generally ableist until someone points out and says, actually there's a different way to do this.

And thankfully, we are getting a little bit better at recognising what that is. And some of the obvious things like, you know, if someone is a wheelchair user and like they can't get onto a train or into a shop or something, we recognise that kind of ableism, but we don't recognise the stuff that's probably a little bit more insidious.

So we may be infantilise people, um, who have intellectual disabilities, for example, or we have a bias to assume that someone who maybe works part-time because of the disability isn't as capable as someone who works full-time and therefore will maybe be passed over for promotion. But we don't maybe tie that into ableist thinking, which is kind of assume we make a lot of assumptions, I think, and as Advita Patel says, which I love, assuming makes an asset of you and me.

And I love that phrase, yes, we love, we love. So, you know, that is, that is exactly accurate.

Sarah: No, that's true. Um, If, if someone listening to this is kind of coming to this and be for the first time and they're thinking about how do I do better in terms of language engagement, including disabled people in communication, very, very top line some fundamental places are things for them to know.

Sara: I think first off, look at the social model of disability. That's your first place to go really is to understand it. So the social model of disability was created and designed by and for disabled people across the seventies, eighties, and you know, kind og as progress since then. And we are much more familiar with it now than we used to be. And it was a, a move on from the medical and charity models. So the social model for anyone whose unfamiliar basically says that, um, a person is disabled by society. So someone, an individual has an impairment, but they are disabled by society.

Um, and you'd move the barriers, you remove the disability. I have slightly, and I like it's not perfect, like I don't entirely a hundred percent agree with it, but the theory of it, mm-hmm. is a foundation it's exactly where to go. It's exactly where we need to go. Sorry. But from a language point of view, the social model is where we see the rise of identity first language.

So seeing a disabled person rather than a person with disabilities. So that's where you start to see that language change come in. Um, and we are getting a lot better at adopting it. So places like NHS, the government scope, disabled charities, they all use the social model of disability as their foundation for things.

And I think as a communications profession, we need to understand that and adopt it into all of our practices cause it really does reframe what you think about disability and how you think about disability. So you remove it from the person and you start looking at society and say, well actually what barriers can be removed to ensure participation in society?

So it's a, it's reframing, but I'd say like Scope has a really good definition of the social model. Just as a really top line kind of way to look at it. It's also in the EDI guide that CIPR have just released. So I was involved in that project and we have resources in that they explain what the social model is and where to go for further reading as well.

Sarah: brilliant. We'll put links to all of those things in the show notes for anybody who wants to find them easily. I think one of the things that I've, we've also talked about is the need to kind of unlearn and social model is a great place to start with that kind of unlearning and shifting thinking as non-disabled people.

Are there other kind of things that you're like, please avoid doing this, or things that you would encourage people to do beyond the social model or on top of that?

Sara: I think social media is wonderful so, like in terms of disability awareness and inclusion. So Twitter did have a very strong disabled community. Obviously everything that is happening there at the moment, it's, you know, and also that's actually quite worrying because Twitter for a lot of people, was a really strong route to community and access to information and finding your people as a, as disabled person as well. Like it was a really important piece of that puzzle.

So TikTok is actually for me, filling that gap a little bit. So I'm on disability TikTok quite a lot, um, and there's amazing people on there, so consume content created by disabled people. Like just seek them out, read what they are writing, listen to what they're saying, like don't assume that you know everything or don't assume what you think about disabilities is correct and rely on like media depictions, cuz although those are getting slightly better, they're still a, a bit of a way off from being really realistic. So actually consume that content. You know, if we are communicators, then we should be able to look at what's, what else is being communicated around us by other people.

Yeah. So, you know, the Unwritten, um, is a great resource. It's, it's, Sadly, sort of closing for the time being.

Sarah: It's going on a six month break, I think, isn't it?

Sara: Yeah. It is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it is still there, so you can still read it, obviously. Um, disability news, service, um, disability, TikTok just find those creators. And actually listen to what they're talking about and the, the issues and concerns that they have because it's all out there, all the informations, it's really easy to access, you just need to kind of go and find it. So I would say start consuming that type of content and listen to what is being said because your, your opinion will start to shift. Like it will start to shift.

And there's great books as well. Disability Visibility is a great book, it's a collection of essays edited by Alice Wong, on disability and lived experience of disability. And that's a great, yeah, it's a great book. It's not very big, it's not big long tomb, you know, we're not asking you to like connect to 25 hours of reading. It's just, it's a, it's a great starting point, I think as well.

Sarah: Yeah, and it's quite a fundamental thing. You, you can't communicate with or to people if you don't understand them. So actually starting to engage with that community on social media is a, a great way of doing that and starting to understand kind of the issues that disabled people are facing in our society and, and some of the things that concern them, they're talking about and, and how they're expressing those things.

I think is, is a really important kind of place to begin, isn't it?

Sara: Yeah. And I think for a long time, like particularly the profession as a whole just didn't treat disabled people like they existed. It was just a sector of society that just got ignored. Like it wasn't marketed to, it wasn't talked to, it wasn't engaged with in any way.

It just, it was put to one side, like it didn't matter.

Sarah: It wasn't part of the conversation.

Sara: It wasn’t part of the conversation, no, not at all. And it just wasn't felt of value. And I think that's, again, partly why I say ableism is so deeply ingrained society is that it did not occur to you at any point to start like engaging with the disabled community, like, it's a very complex, very rich community. Communities within communities. you know, little pockets of different, you know, it's, it's broad and, and deep and intersectional. Completely intersectional.

Sarah: It's a huge point.

Sara: It's a huge point. So if, you know, if you're speaking to particular demographics, say, you know, queer women for example. So those women will be disabled. Some of them will be disabled to have chronic illnesses, for example. But you don't, like that element of them is just ignored in favor of the other factors. So I think we need to get a lot better of at, at realising that disability is a significant part of society.

It's like one in four people now, the stats used to be one in five and I think it's now one in four. So one in four people, you're just gonna ignore that doesn't make any, it doesn't make any sense.

Sarah: Doesn't make any sense.

Sara: Makes no sense. Like if you were producing a campaign and someone said that to you, you'd be like, yeah, that, that's, that's a bad move, isn't it?

That doesn't, doesn't seem like a great idea.

Sarah: 25% the audience just gone.

Sara: Yeah. Yeah. We'll just forget them because, you know, we either infantilize them or we don't see the value in society. And that again.

Sarah: Yeah, or the other thing that I've, I've heard you talk about is that we kind of treat them as heroes and inspiration and, and that's also quite offensive because that's, I, I'm trying to think who I'm paraphrasing or quoting misquoting. I'll put it in the show notes when I find the source. But, you know, no mind of being heroic will actually get you up the stairs if you're in a, you know, if you're a wheelchair user.

Sara Thornhurst: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sarah: It's just, it doesn't help. Yeah. It's, it's patronising. And I think that's a trap that sometimes non-disabled people fall into. We go like, aren't they amazing?

Sara: Yeah. And it's like, but what are the, so what are the, what is your opinion then? The question I always wanna ask people when they do that is okay, so what's your opinion of someone like me who will not be able to run a marathon? Am I less valuable to you? because my energy limits illness means if I even try to run, my body will shut down. It will shut down and stop working. I'm not gonna be able to do that. But am I less valuable to you because I haven't overcome something? because that's what you're telling me. You're not saying those words, but that's essentially what you're saying to someone is that you find them more valuable because they have achieved something that you think is remarkable. But if they didn't have a disability, you wouldn't think that's remarkable.

So you end up in a weird circular thinking about it. So, and next time. And you see posts like that in LinkedIn all the time, like these inspirational posts. I used to reply to 'em and be like, this is inspiration porn please stop it.

Sarah: We'll pop the link to the inspiration porn Ted talk in the, in the show notes I think.

Sara: because that's who said the statement about the stairs.

Sarah: Yeah is it? Thank you very much. And I think that's how we see a lot of the media talk about disabled people as well, isn't it? That they're all kind of, you know, heroic and special and, and actually that's not helpful either.

Sara: No, you'll never see them on the news. Like if they've done something remarkable or offer charity or they've like, they've climbed a mountain. I know there was a show recently and I, it was something to do with pianos and I'm not entirely sure what it was, but there was a blind girl who, um, I think she's blind and autistic and played the piano beautifully, but the response to her, I think people need to examine.

Was she good? Yeah. She, from what? The very small clip that I saw, she was fantastic, but she's just a fantastic piano player. But it was made into something more because she was blind, a visually impaired and autistic. So we need to kind of start examining those types of things and our responses to them. A lot more to set that untangle, that kind of ableism that we have.

Sarah: And as communicators , take responsibility for the things that we perpetuate. Yes. I think is a is a big part of where the profession has part and influence. I mean, part of it is that, um, you know, accessibility, inclusion, but also driving change potentially in some of those things.

And also then looking at our own hiring practices and looking who's in the industry, which is something that you've really been leading on as well, is looking as it's, are, are we as communicators making it, um, difficult and for anybody who's, um, disabled to work in our industry and contribute, because I tell you, I would like to hire some of those creatives on social media because they're brilliant.

Sara: Yeah. And so the, the increased awareness of neurodiversity, so I have a, I have a slight hangup on it in that, it's, it's on the one hand it's really great and I am delighted that people are able to now have access to both language, diagnosis, and I know like, that ties into the medical model and we don't wanna focus too much on disorders, but having that diagnosis or understanding of your brain and, and knowing actually why things are the way they are for you is, is huge.

And it's a huge process for people to go through and, you know, and come to terms with an understanding and that is vitally important that people go through that. However, I would say that our industry is probably treating it as a trend, and I don't mean that in an individual way, but it's an overall thing to talk about like most of the articles are seen at the moment are about neurodiversity in terms of EDI, and that's great in one way because it's needed and these got all these conversations are needed, but it kind of narrows our focus again to very specific elements of disability rather than trying to just take the barriers down for everybody.

So it's very in individualistic. That's the way, that's the way I'm kind of looking at it. So at the moment, things like, um, reasonable adjustments are very individualistic. So someone comes to you and say, I, you know, I have, um, an impairment or disability. This is what I need to go create. We'll do this for you.

But these people don't then look at the wider organisation and go, right, how do we choose, change that organisation wide and just remove that barrier altogether? And so we're very individualistic at the moment. I think the neurodiversity discussion is sort of tying into that a little bit, and it would be great to see it.

People broaden out a little bit more and understand that disability and chronic illness and your diversity are all part of this system that really needs a working world that moves. It is all kind of sits outside capitalism. Not, or, or, or sits adjacent to it rather than the capital system we're in ause it doesn't really do any damn in favors. Um, And really what we're asking for in terms of reasonable adjustments or hybrid working or four day weeks, that's really what we're pushing for anyway. We are saying, this system doesn't work for us. We need a new system. And it doesn't feel very joined up at the moment.

It feels very like, that's a win, that's a win and that's what we're here. Yeah. But if you look, if you take a step back and actually consider from the pandemic what we're pushing for and what, like Janet Jen said, when Jen said, now, I have no idea. I think so, um, is pushing for, is that, is that change to how we work, that really deep rooted change to how we work and that's what disability has been calling for, for a long time as well.

Sarah: Yeah. So rather than having those kind of small incremental steps, starting to think more about a seismic shift in thinking and then from thinking into action and behaviour.

Sara: Yeah. Yeah. Cause if you've got 10 people in your organisation, you've made reasonable adjustments for all of them. Then I don't see why that should be limited to just those people, like I'll clarify that little bit in that everybody will have their own individual needs in an organisation. Yes. Regardless. And those should, should be met. Um, but instead of just targeting a single person at a time, take that opportunity to revisit all your processes and your systems and just go, actually, how can we embed a lot of these changes into our organisation to make it better for everybody? and actually then we might see more people coming through with a disability, chronic or neurodiversity who, who find our organisation accessible and want to work here.

Sarah: Yeah. That feels like the perfect place to stop, cuz that feels like the way we would like it to be. And that's a great place to end

Sara: That’s my utopia.

Sarah: Well, you know, you have to have a vision, I think, in order to make progress. So thank you for sharing that vision with us today. I'll also mention because Sara didn't, that she does great training courses on the social model and on inclusive communications. I think you have them on demand and also my live on Zoom, um, on your website.

So I'll make sure to pop a link in, uh, the notes to that cause that's, I met Sara, um, and consultancy as well. So thank you very much. Fascinating conversation, lots and lots to think about and look forward to continuing the conversation offline and hopefully in the comments to this as well.

Sara: Yeah. Thank you so much. I, um, it's been really great to have a conversation with you as you say we could probably chat for another three weeks, easily on all this.

Sarah: Yes possibly longer. Thanks Sara.

Sara: Bye

Sarah: If you've enjoyed today's conversation and maybe wanted to join it, then please do get in touch so we can talk more. I'd love to hear from you.

You can sign up from my newsletter by finding me on Linkedin, and let's connect and continue the conversation.

Thank you.