Description
Archives are essential for both disabled people`s movements (DPMs) and disability studies.For movements, the past is a strategic resource; and its preservation allows contemporary
activists to learn from previous struggles. For academics, historical objects, documents,
media texts, and pictures of disabled people give insights into living realities, social
relations, and institutions which would be otherwise unavailable.
Unfortunately, most government- and university-owned archives do not preserve records
produced by, or concerned with the lives of, disabled people- or limit themselves to records
about disabled people created by medical or charitable professionals. In the face of this
‘symbolic annihilation’ (Caswell: 2016); disabled activists around Europe have gradually
collected and curated their own archive projects over the last three decades, and
experimented with novel forms of access and governance to better relate archival practice to
disabled people outside academia. This process began in the 1990s, with Colin Barnes’ digital
disability archive (hosted by the University of Leeds) of open-access articles and speeches
from the British DPM; and Volker Schönwiese’s preservation of research texts, life stories,
and video testimonials of disabled Austrian activists at the University of Innsbruck (Pfahl &
Urthaler: forthcoming). More recently, these have been joined by large social movement
archives run by Disabled People’s Organisations in Great Britain (The Disabled People’s
Archive, Manchester), the Netherlands (The Kreukelcollectief Archive and Cultural Centre,
Leiden), and Germany (The Disability Movement Archive, Marburg).
This joint session brings together academics and activists involved in running disabled
people-led archives for the first international discussion of the significance of, and challenges
facing, archives ‘of’, ‘by’, and ‘for’ disabled activists (Clarke, Graby & Beesley: forthcoming).
It will be staged as a panel discussion between disabled archivists/archive practitioners from
different national contexts, and will address:
- The collections held by these archives, and the political and academic research
opportunities arising from them;
- The application of accessibility standards designed by DPMs around Europe to
digital and physical collections of documents, audio-visual recordings, and artefacts;
- The role of movement-led disability archives in democratizing heritage institutions
and academic research;
- Generative conversations, and tensions, between academic uses of archives to
uncover lived experiences of disablement (Brilmyer: 2022), and activists’ insistence
that archives be collectively owned by movements and subject to their projects of
transformation (Beesley & Clarke: 2023).
The contributions below show how these archives contribute to a historical understanding of
how disability has been shaped in Europe, and the struggles of disabled people to advance
their visions of social change in different national contexts.
Our panel aims to lay the groundwork for greater international co-operation between
disabled people-led archives. Through this initial, public, conversation we hope to encourage
the sharing of ideas, material, skills, and access innovations between (current and future)
archivists and users of such collections. Through such grassroots, international connections,
we seek to unify and develop strategies to remove barriers to archival research, and ensure
long-term public access to the social history of disability across the continent.
| Period | 8 Jul 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Transformations: ALTER - European Network of Disability Research Conference 2025 |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Innsbruck, AustriaShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |