About the Display
The display occupies a rectangular board in the department's social learning space. It consists of images and text boxes based around particular themes, with the title 'Disability History Month' above it in a 'wavy' text box whose background colour alternates between blue and orange . There are also images showing the covers of various books in disability studies, and you can find these listed on the Further Resources page. You can find out more information about some the images and case studies featured below.
General Background (Mia Edwards and Caitlin Hoyland)
Researching Disability History: Sources (Alice Fairclough)
Guide Dogs in the Ancient and Medieval World (Ella Buckingham)
Sonoma State Home Case Study (Alice Fairclough)
Blind Activism during the Twentieth Century (Alice Fairclough)
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Were you taught disability history at school?
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How were you taught about disability history at school?
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How might we best teach disability history in primary and secondary school?
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How might our methods of teaching disability history, as well as the topics that we explore, change as students’ progress through the key stage groups?
Why is disability history important?
Disability is not a static concept. Different definitions have been used throughout time and different cultures. Terms of diagnosis could be racist, be hugely stigmatised, and also be shaped by social, cultural, and political factors. Thus, by understanding disability history, it can tell us much about a particular society at that time. Beliefs about the causes of disability changed from largely religious, to being explained by the science of the day. This too can help the public appreciate the legacy of current understandings of disability. Disabilities gained public attention dependent on society, for example, during wars often disability focused around amputees and during the eugenic movement it focused on more cognitive disabilities. People with disabilities have also organized themselves throughout history and engaged in activism to fight prejudice and injustices. Inclusion of disability history sheds light on the stories of people with disabilities, and brings attention to campaigns ongoing today.
Disability history as an intersectional discipline?
Ideas about disability intersected with ideas about class, race, and gender. For example, racist attitudes lead to the creation of disabilities specific to black people. This too happened with sexist and classist attitudes. Historians should take an intersectional approach when examining the history of disabilities and take factors such as race, class, and gender into account.
Developments in disability history
Disability history, like other disciplines, has been influenced by wider historiographical trends:
Social history: Historians in the past have reflected on disability history as a means of analysing social relations.
Literary turn: This meant a renewed focus on diagnostics, the meanings behind these words, and the weight they held. It has also lead to analysis of the word ‘normality’ and how this concept influenced the conception of disability.
Body: The scholarly focus on the body in the 90s and the building upon ideas of biopower lead to new understandings of disability in reference to power relations.
Intersectional: The concept of intersectionality has allowed historians to take into account other important factors that contribute toward the experience of people with disabilities, such as, race, class, and gender.
Experience: Scholars like Roy Porter called for historians to examine patient experience by reading between the lines of patient records. Joan Scott argued that in this process, we should not loose sight of multiple social factors that shape experience.
Activism: Experience history has sometimes received criticism for depicting people with disability as passive actors which has provoked renewed attention onto their activism in the past.
(Alice Fairclough)
“how a society defines disability and whom it identifies as deformed or disabled may reveal much about that society’s attitudes and values concerning the body”
David M. Turner, 'Introduction: Approaching Anomalous Bodies', in Social Histories of Disability and Deformity (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 2.