History as a Weapon: Disability Archives and the Fight for our Future

Disability is increasingly recognised as an analytical concept across the humanities, alongside familiar concepts of class, gender and race. The academic discipline of disability history, for instance, now encompasses both the analysis of the group ‘disabled persons’, and of broader phenomena; including histories of the welfare state, employment law, and the arts. This trend accompanies growing attention to disability in heritage institutions. Museums and archives have begun to identify disability within their holdings – with new curatorial and interpretive opportunities emerging for already familiar collections.

Such interest is welcome – although unevenly spread – but comes at significant cost. To borrow terms from democratic theory, these approaches prioritise our history’s inclusion over its contestation. Our social existence – how we lived, learned, loved, worked, and thought – is now more visible than hitherto in scholarship and heritage; but is organised and put to work within elite institutions fro