www.public-disabilityhistory.org
(Sebastian Barsch)
Since its first steps in the 1990’s, the field of Disability History has been growing. Nowadays it is considered as an established and specific historical sub-discipline. One of the core characteristics of the disability histories told so far is their strong connection to environments outside of the academic world. Whereas other scholarly fields sometimes struggle to reach out to public debates, politics, and activism, Disability History has steadily worked its way from the public to the field of scientific research and discussion. Histories produced by disability historians indeed aim to trigger public debate. They want to enlarge our understanding of contemporary and past disability discrimination and to contribute to ongoing theoretical as well as practical struggles towards emancipation, participation and advocacy. In short, disability histories have always tried to come up with scholarly work that is also meaningful for a broader audience: The public!
This Public Disability History blogjournal aims to stimulate and support activist as well as academic reflection on the public character of disability histories. It’s main aim thus consists in promoting and systematizing reflection with regard to the divergent ways curators of exhibitions, directors of documentaries, theatre plays and dance performances, authors of graphic novels and edited volumes, university scholars etc. have (un)successfully integrated disability histories in order to reach out to a certain public and bring about societal change. As a consequence the general aims of the blogjournal are:
- Transforming Disability History into a debatable thing, the subject of public debates.
- Offering a platform to present various projects from different fields that deal with Disability History.
- Setting up and intensifying cooperation between people with and without disability.
- Promoting practices that make Disability History research accessible to everybody.
The blogjournal is open for all contributions that approach the general. Given its ambition to provide a space where Disability History can become a trigger for rethinking the way people with and without disabilities have been living and do live together, special attention is devoted to accessibility issues. This implies that images, which illustrate the journal texts, are described in detail, videos will only be uploaded if provided with subtitles and the texts need to be written in accessible English. The hope we have is that Public Disability History will provide opportunities for overcoming dichotomous ways of thinking and speaking.
