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Dr Miro Griffiths is a Disability Studies scholar, based in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, at the University of Leeds. His research primarily focuses on understanding disabled people's experiences of resistance, activism, social movement participation, and advocacy. His contribution to existing bodies of literature has progressed ideas and theories about power, resistance practices, and disabled people's pursuit of liberation.

Dr Griffiths is also prominent within social policy analysis – particularly disability policy associated with health and social care personalisation agendas, welfare and social security provision, hate crime prevention, and labour market participation strategies (UK and Europe). Currently, Dr Griffiths is an Associate Professor of Social Policy and Disability Studies.

Dr Miro recently appeared on Radio 4's Lent talks, where he explored the issue of 'Power and Support'. In this episode, Miro,  who has spinal muscular atrophy and receives 24-hour personal health care assistance, explores power and support. 

Having listened to the talk several times, we are compelled to share both the link to the program (on the right) and the script below. 

Griffiths, M. (2026) ‘Power and support’, Lent Talks (BBC Radio 4, radio broadcast), 1 March. Available at:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GITYEOlULbE0l8KeBiTaE3B_ZZYNsrrY?usp=sharing 

For me to survive ‐ and for my life to flourish ‐ I rely on an array of technologies and support. I use a power wheelchair to navigate space, software that responds to my voice so that I can communicate, and respiratory machines and therapies to keep my breathing stable as I live with a progressive neuromuscular condition. Accompanying all of this is a team of personal assistants who are with me in every moment and, alongside my partner, they facilitate and enact the decisions I make, respond to my requests for support, and work with me to meet my health needs.

When I think about what support means, a typical encounter keeps returning to me because it shows how power and support coalesce. It comes into focus through the eyes of newly employed personal assistants, in those first weeks when they are still learning my routines, still calibrating what my support looks like in public, and still startled by how quickly other people register my existence ‐ and the demonstration of support itself.

They notice it before I do, because for them it is new. We will be in a café where an assistant lifts a drink to my mouth, or compresses a sandwich so that I can bite it. Or we will be in a seminar room at my university, rearranging chairs and tables so that I can reach the front to lecture. Or we will be moving along a busy pavement, and my assistant will steady my head as it falls sideways, or stop my hand sliding from the joystick when the ground tilts, when the paving breaks, when an incline demands more strength than my body has. And in each of these ordinary moments, they will sense the subtle shift in the environment: the glance that lingers too long, the sudden intensity of politeness, the embarrassed smile, the half‐step away, the offer of help that is too insistent or the prolonged commentary about what I ought to do or the disruption a stranger believes I have caused. All done to resolve the discomfort of witnessing support made visible.

What they are meeting, in those first weeks, is not my support needs as such. They are meeting the way power produces meaning around support: how requiring assistance is made visible, and then made strange; how the public mood can swing between empathy, sympathy, and intolerance; how embarrassment can settle into the space between bodies and re‐arrange what feels possible.

I have lived with this long enough that I can move through it almost automatically. But when someone new is alongside me, their surprise encourages me to question what is happening. Not simply, “Why are people like that?” but, “What is being produced here, in this moment, between strangers?”

Power is usually imagined as something you either have or you do not. A possession. But I never think of it in this way. Power, in my view, feels less like an object to hold and more like a current that flows, or a force that produces an affect. It runs through the interaction itself, shaping what can be said, what can be asked, what can be assumed. It does not only stop actions. It produces meanings. It makes certain roles seem natural: the helper and the helped, the capable and the dependent, the ordinary body and the body that is expected to be scrutinised and unaccepted.

Support is one of the most intimate places where this productive force shows itself. Many people have been taught to treat support as something that belongs to the strong and is delivered to the weak. Under that story, a disabled body is read as lacking, broken, out of place. Support becomes a moral stage: the helper is generous, the helped is grateful, and normality lingers everywhere, dictating what counts as an ideal body ‐ and how that body is supposed to move, function, and be in the world.

But in my life, support is not an optional kindness. It is infrastructure. It is labour, skill, trust, and often money. It is planning. It is coordination. And because it is all of those things, it is saturated with power, in the sense that it produces what becomes possible.

When I hire a personal assistant, some people imagine I am surrendering control. In reality, I am building a structure that allows my self‐determination to take shape in the world. I am making the everyday reflective of my desires, interests, circumstances, and responsibilities: friendships, love, adventure, relaxation, work, last‐minute changes, staying late, being ordinary.

People assume that the difficult part is my body, but the difficult part is often the system: staff rotas, gaps in funding or reviews of existing support provision, last‐minute cancellations, contingency planning, and the quiet emotional labour of making instructions clear without making the relationship brittle. If a personal assistant is unwell, I do not simply manage. I redesign the day. I rearrange meetings. My partner is compelled to change her plans and take on more support activities. I calculate what I can postpone, and what I must ask others to do with me. In those moments, power shows itself as time and options: the ability to keep commitments without having to bargain for basic access. It is also where interdependency becomes visible, not as a weakness, but as a way a life is held together.

A personal assistant is not there to rescue me from my body. They are there to support the life I am choosing to live. That distinction matters because it changes what support produces. If support is framed as rescue, it produces a grateful subject, someone expected to accept what is given. If support is framed through self‐determination, it produces something else: a person with authority over their own life.

This is where the question of power stops being abstract. Power is what terms are set. Power is where, and how, decisions are made, what counts as a legitimate need and what counts as too much. Power is which bodies are accepted, which lives are supported, and who are required to keep negotiating their participation. I have felt this in a familiar pattern: assurances of access that collapse on arrival, systems that work “most of the time,” and polite apologies offered as substitutes for participation.

Campaigners for disability justice have insisted, for a long time, on an idea that can sound counter‐intuitive: that independent living is not about being self‐sufficient. It means not being managed through life by someone else’s decisions. It means choice and control: where you live, who supports you, how you participate, what risks you take. It means having support that expands your world rather than narrowing it.

In other words, it redefines power. Power is not the fantasy of needing nobody. Power is the capacity to shape the conditions of your life. And that capacity is always relational.

This is where interdependency comes in. We live through networks. We live through systems and arrangements. We live through each other. Disabled life makes that interdependency visible, and that visibility can unsettle people, because it exposes the myth that self‐sufficiency is the measure of worth and the goal to pursue.

So when someone says, “If you ever need anything, just ask,” I hear more than kindness. I hear how support has been kept in the realm of personal goodwill, rather than public responsibility. Goodwill can be generous, but it is not reliable. It can disappear. It can come with conditionality. It can quietly return you to the role of the grateful recipient.

A truly accessible and inclusive world cannot be built on goodwill alone. It has to be built on a shared commitment to producing accessibility and support as ordinary: in transport, housing, education, work, culture, and public space. It has to be built so that disabled people are not guests in society, but valued and expected participants.

This is where the Passion of Christ enters my thinking. I value the contribution that religion has in organising our societies, but I am not religious myself. I do not come to the Passion of Christ as doctrine, instead, I come to it as a story that exposes how power moves through bodies, crowds, and atmospheres.

There is a point in that story when Jesus is made to carry the cross. His body has been injured and exhausted. The demand placed upon him is absolute: keep moving, carry the burden, complete the spectacle.

And then there is a moment when he cannot. The body stops. The forward motion fails. The story admits limitation. It admits that a body can reach a point where it cannot comply with what is demanded or expected. And then it introduces a practical solution: another person is brought in.

Simon of Cyreen is pulled from the crowd and compelled to carry the cross with him. Support appears, but it appears through coercion. The same power that stages punishment extracts labour to keep the machinery moving.

That detail matters, because it reminds me that support is not automatically ethical. Support can be mobilised to control. Help can be demanded. Vulnerability can be managed in ways that serve authority rather than the person.

And yet, even inside that coercion, something is revealed. The cross is not carried by one body alone. The myth of solitary endurance breaks open. Interdependency appears as a fact of life and existence.

Disabled people’s lives, too, are often staged in ways that keep norms intact: as tragedy to be pitied, or as inspiration to be admired. Both keep the audience at a distance, and both treat difficulty and struggle as personal rather than a communal responsibility. If my struggle is a private drama, then the world does not have to change. If my access is a gift, then society does not have to embed it within the roots of collective organisation.

The Passion story, at least as I hear it, does not treat the need for support as a private matter hidden away from public view. It places bodies and assistance in the open, and it shows how support can be staged and managed. A person is made into an example, a warning, a spectacle ‐ and the crowd is meant to learn from it. But the story also keeps the crowd in frame, because power does not coalesce only with those giving orders. It moves through the conditions and circumstances of the moment: what people accept as normal, what they refuse to see, and what they excuse with the phrase, “that is just how things are.”

In my own life, the support that matters most is the support that does not reduce me. Support that does not turn my needs into a test of someone else’s goodness. Support that lets me be impatient, ambitious, tired, funny, and contradictory.

That is why self‐determination matters. It is the difference between living a life and being managed through it. Self‐determination means I can decide how I want to be supported, and refuse arrangements that diminish me. Interdependency means that none of this is an individual achievement. It means we build systems that distribute support in ways that are reliable and just. It means we stop treating some people as naturally entitled to assistance, and others as naturally destined for struggle.

If you want to know what a society believes about power, look at what it produces when a body requires support and assistance. Does it blame the body, or reorganise society? Does it offer pity, or build access? Does it demand gratitude, or commit resources?

Articulating power in this way is not an invitation to despair. It is an invitation to responsibility, because what is produced can be produced differently. We can produce a world where all life is supported and valued, where access is ordinary, and where interdependency is treated as a shared condition of life.

And perhaps, in the end, that is the most challenging part of power: willingness to be implicated in one another’s survival and flourishing.