Vic Finkelstein: campaigner who redefined terms

Recent news of the passing of Vic Finkelstein, disability activist and academic, symbolises the end of a crucial period in the development of disabled people's struggle for an enabling society. Professor Alan Roulstone pays this tribute

Born into a Jewish South African family in 1938, Vic Finkelstein applied his insights on apartheid South Africa to his own experience of disablement and exclusion after spinal cord injury sustained in a pole vaulting accident.

Vic noted clear parallels between the spatial, economic and cultural segregation of black and white South Africans and the limits that were placed on disabled people at that time. This was overlaid with his awareness of the ostracising of the Jewish people throughout history dating back to their need to escape Egypt in biblical times.

Vic went on to align his own personal struggles with the barriers to collective struggle against apartheid. He was eventually detained under the infamous 180 day detention laws and was treated brutally by the South African political police.

Vic was banned from social congregation for five years, something he caustically noted happened to many disabled people anyway.

He came to Britain to escape apartheid and apply his applied psychology degrees to clinical work with disabled people.

Circumstances quickly moved Vic beyond NHS work into academic disability work. He chaired the “Handicapped Person in the Community” course at the Open University for 20 years and played a key part in establishing academic disability studies.

But he is probably best remembered for working with Paul and Judy Hunt in the 1970s in establishing the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) and developing the social model of disability.

Vic and his wife Liz worked tirelessly to promote a model of disability that challenged prevailing notions of disability as loss and an adjustment to personal tragedy.

He also challenged the incomes and lobbying approach adopted by the Disablement Income Group during the 1970s, noting that this was a compensatory approach to disability with no sustainable grassroots identity.

Vic helped change the understanding of disability into that of a social oppression of an unresponsive disabling society. He offered an alternative image of professionals allied to disabled people and enabling technologies, spawning a great deal of academic work.

Vic’s own words best sum up his purpose and motivations in making the world a better place for disabled people.

“Lessons from the South African liberation struggle, the anti-apartheid campaigns in the UK, the national and international disability emancipatory struggles and my academic contributions all seem to add up to a life-long affirmation of human tenacity in pursuing justice and social rights.

“… When I went pole-vaulting at Durban High School in 1954 I left behind one destiny and moved instead ‘forward to square one’ and began living another more fulfilling, more rewarding and more human lifestyle than I could ever have predicted.”

Vic is survived by his two daughters Anna and Rebecca.

• Alan Roulstone is Professor of Disability and Inclusion at Northumbria University