Disability history

January 27, 2020 12:20 AM

How was school? Disabled people's experiences of education over the last century. Public Disability History, with narratives including depression in Nazi Germany and an amputee in Napoleonic France. Disabled people at Oxford University. Cabinet of Curiosities: How Disability was kept in a Box (performance by Mat Fraser). On Twitter, David Turner posts about disability history.

And for those with access to iPlayer, Peter White's series on disability history.

And a final link - not directly about disability history, but I liked these transcription poems by visual artist and disabled person Nancy Willis.

posted by paduasoy (4 comments total)

Oh. Oh, that first link is amazing, especially since I'm much more familiar with American disability history than the UK tradition--the timeline is therefore missing a lot of the usual touchstones I "expect" to see (Gallaudet protests, ADA, etc), and has a bunch of different events and people I didn't necessarily know about instead. I like that. It's a good reminder that disability activism and history is never quite as fragmented as it sometimes seems, even though for many of us it takes active effort to connect the pieces together and puzzle together a coherent narrative.

At the same time, the experiences are often really familiar. From the perspective of someone who teaches, I am constantly struck and frustrated by how often inflexibility and lack of imagination or even the minor effort to listen from teachers created (and creates) educational barriers from students. That theme resonates here as it has in my professional life, both from the perspective of the disabled students I know and from my own perspective as a (very junior) instructor without a lot of freedom or status. It's so frustrating.
posted by sciatrix at 7:29 AM on January 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

The Oxford University link - specifically the second segment by Dan Holloway - hits it right on the nail.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 8:33 AM on January 27, 2020

The transcription poems are amazing!
posted by Ausamor at 8:58 AM on January 27, 2020

And for those with access to iPlayer, Peter White's series on disability history.

Happily, episodes can be downloaded as mp3s, so iPlayer access isn't strictly a must -- and it's also available as a podcast feed if you look it up via a podcast app. It's a great series!

Just to add: the University of Leeds Disability Archive is pretty great.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:13 AM on January 27, 2020 [3 favorites]