Blog

Inclusion as a continuous practice of dignity: A commentary by Vix Jensen

Vix Jensen 26 November 2025

It is 2009. I am about to take my final exams in high school, before spreading my wings towards university. Never have I been called into the headmistress’ office before, always knowing that my position in mainstream school as a physically disabled person was reliant on my being quiet. Good. High-achieving, low demand. As very, very normal as possible. The little girl who was told she may never read or write is lucky to be here at all, after all.

And here I am now, sitting in front of the head of this institution. I can touch the end of the seven years spent here with the tips of my fingers. I have read and written so much.

“We’ve failed our inspection,” she says, “due to lack of accessibility. Perhaps you can give us some advice on how we might be able to pass the next one.”

A reel in my head. The bench in the lunch room that I had to swing my legs over painfully every day instead of a chair. The endless, endless stairs between me and most of my classes. Being forced to participate in physical education sessions as the umpire, or points-counter, or silent, squirming witness to everyone else’s movement. The teacher who, every time she saw me walking anywhere, would giddily nickname me Speedy Gonzales.

Roiling nausea, now, trying to fish for a dignified answer to this extraordinarily undignified question. The one that came seven years too late.

“You’re leaving now,” this question says silently. “We hope you had a wonderful experience here, quiet, docile, and as very, very normal as possible. We have failed on a measure of inclusion and that is bad for our bottom line. How can we ensure we protect ourselves?“

In that moment, seventeen years old and lucky, despite everything, to be here at all, I knew that there was a part of my life I wished to dedicate to the pursuit of a gentler, and more just world for disabled people. One where the conversation between me and the headmistress would have been an ongoing one. Where it might have sounded closer to something like this:

“Tell us how this looks through your eyes. What do you need now that you aren’t getting? How is your personhood being swallowed here, in this environment you fought so hard to get to? How can your story make for part of a strong foundation of true dignity and inclusion for us? How can our understanding of your experience lead to actionable, viable, systemic change? How may we build something different together, for the next person?”

These are the questions I wanted then, and want now. They are some of the questions I believe should inform future research into dignity in a general sense, and especially in the development sector. They succeed in holding dignity and inclusion as both pragmatic principles and inherent values. They are curious and fluid. They put the human right in the middle.

In my work since, helping organizations and individuals develop reliable frameworks to assess dignity and inclusion and to live them out, I have kept these questions top of mind. The lasting lesson I have learned is this: the achievement is the process. True inclusion is a living, breathing, expansive thing, just like the people at the center of it. It is a ‘walking-with’. There is no end-point, no final boss, no battle to end the war. There are only level-ups. There are true stories that support data, and data that support stories, and constant conversation between the two. The pieces you have read in this report understand the push and pull necessary to go towards enduring global change, which honors, respects and includes all different kinds of people. We should strive towards a stretching of our imaginations, rather than towards the completion of a goal. The material collected here reflects this pursuit in action.

There is a popular rallying cry that has defined the long, unrelenting fight for disability rights: Nothing about us without us, we chant, on the stairs of government buildings, chained to buses, in boardrooms, bedrooms and hospital rooms. The top note of this cry, in my view, is this: We ask that you dignify us, you policy-makers, decision-takers, researchers, business owners, fellow humans, by listening to us, bearing witness and trusting the wholeness of our experience. We ask that this trust shape your work and your conclusions. We ask that you remain curious, humble and open to redirection. We ask that you live with us in the swaying movement of the creation of this fairer world. That you understand that, for many people, the state of dignity has been defined by the loud lack of it.

We know what it feels like to be disrespected, to be spoken for, to be flattened. We know what it looks like when the world is imagined, by people with functioning bodies, as a small, unchangeable, static thing. One not big enough to contain our full humanity. And we believe we can imagine something else. We can build something, together, that looks different for the next person, before it is too late.

It is 2025. I am lucky to be here at all, after all. And it is because of this luck, the total cosmic unlikeliness of it, that I remain committed – relentlessly and completely committed – to a vision of the world where every one of us is afforded true dignity as a human right. Where every person’s fair claim to honor and respect is inextricably braided to their capacity to participate and be included fully in the world in which they live. A world in which we are asking the right questions, listening to the answers, and letting them change what we do next.

There is nothing about any of us, without any of us. The rallying cry should dictate our direction, especially in the field of dignity. I know that the world is big enough already for the sound of it, and for the stretching of our imaginations. Let’s commit here, now, to the process. To the project. We are lucky to be here, after all.

_______________________