Cripping the archive: disability, history, and power

Abstract

"How do we explain the conspicuous absence of disability from the histories we write? What forces and factors create this dynamic? How can disability be everywhere and nowhere, present and absent, and obvious and overlooked in both the historical record and historians' interpretations of the past? Jenifer L. Barclay and Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy edit a collection of interdisciplinary essays that consider how and why physical, sensory, and psychological disabilities are underrepresented, erased, or distorted in the historical record. The contributors draw on the methodology and practice of cripping to uncover disability in contested archives and explore ways to build inclusive archives accountable to, and centered on, disabled people and disability justice. Throughout, they show ableness informing the politics of the archive as a physical space, a discriminatory record, and a collection of silences. An essential contribution to research methods and disability justice, Cripping the Archive offers a blueprint for intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches that bridge disability studies, history, and archival studies"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents

Foreword / Jaipreet Virdi -- Introduction / Jenifer L. Barclay and Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy -- Part I. Uncovering. The missing Romanian chapter in disability history / Radu Harald Dinu ; Deafening architectural modernism : reconsidering the archive of Adolf Loos / Nina Vollenbröker ; "Brain of woman, at 30, half an idiot" : recovering disability histories from the "footnotes" of the British Museum Collection / Isabelle Lawrence ; Cripping the convict archive / Emily Cock ; The feverish saint : a queer crip encounter with the Public Universal Friend / KJ Cerankowski -- Part II. Obscuring. Disability, the modern state, and the archive in the United States / Audra Jennings ; There are no invalids in the archive : hidden sources and ideological obscurations in the history of international blind activism / Maria Cristina Galmarini ; Silence and stigma : how archival restrictions threaten histories of the mentally ill in the United States / Sarah Handley-Cousins ; Recovering the past to understand the present : cripping school segregation in New York City / Francine Almash and Jan Valle -- Part III. Decolonizing. Settler ableism : indigeneity, unsettling the archive, and accountability in history / Sarah Whitt, Traci Brynne Voyles, and Susan Burch ; Hall of miracles : Central American Disability Archives / Heather Vrana ; Cripping the settler archive : disability in women's memoirs of the Indian Service / Jess L. Wilcox Cowing -- Part IV. De-centering. Deafness and silences in the archives / Octavian E. Robinson, Meredith Peruzzi, James McCarthy, William T. Ennis III, Brian H. Greenwald, and Joseph J. Murray ; The spoken word is not neutral : oral history, disability, and nonverbal communication / Osnat Katz and Samuel Goldstone-Brady ; Ephemeral madness : the patient-theorists of psychiatric archives / Liana Kathleen Cole ; Privileged, oppressed, and liberated : unearthing the archives of a multigenerational white deaf family / Leala Holcomb, Tara Holcomb, and Thomas K. Holcomb -- Part V. Accessing. "It felt like everything" : disability, affect, and the creation of archival interdependence / Gracen Mikus Brilmyer ; Transnational disability praxis : archiving survival, resistance, and resilience amid ongoing emergencies / Sona Kazemi, Hemachandran Karah, Efrat Gold, and Mary Jean Hande ; Accessibility widely defined : making the University of Massachusetts archives' disability collections available to everyone / Shukoo Tamao and Aaron Rubinstein ; File/life : remediating the Pennhurst Archive with community archivists / Nicki Pombier -- Epilogue / Jenifer L. Barclay and Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy.