Short description:

This volume engages with disability heritage as a participatory, political, relational, and unfinished practice, linking the preservation of the past to lived experience in the present as well as imagined futures.

Long description:

This volume engages with disability heritage as a participatory, political, relational, and unfinished practice, linking the preservation of the past to lived experience in the present as well as imagined futures. Contributors examine how disability reshapes what counts as heritage, who it is for, and how it is made, and demonstrate ways to transform institutional as well as community-based approaches.

Contributors from Ireland, Germany, Australia, the UK, Sweden, Japan, Poland, Romania, Belgium, Italy, and The Netherlands apply concepts from critical disability studies and disability history to explore participatory, activist, and decolonial practices that challenge ableist structures. Written in an accessible way and drawing on case studies from performance, museums, (digital) archives, landscapes, and architecture, chapters demonstrate how disability is embedded in histories yet rarely acknowledged as a constituting force within them. Positioning disability as integral to heritage-making, the authors show how disability actively shapes archival research, heritage practices, and what can be remembered. Topics include integrating disability perspectives in heritage education, redesigning recruitment and career trajectories, the challenges and benefits of working both within and outside of established institutions, strategies for reinterpreting objects including embodied and sensory methods, and collecting intangible heritage.

The book is aimed at scholars and students in heritage, museum, archival, disability, cultural and historical studies, as well as practitioners, policymakers, and activists. It offers conceptual tools and grounded examples for engaging disability heritage not as a bounded and stable field or object, but as a relational practice that demands attentiveness to friction and difference.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements; List of Contributors; 1. INTRODUCTION; 2. ACCESS, INCLUSION AND BEYOND -- 2.1 Disability Art and Cultural Heritage: Ethical and Political Issues in an Italian Cultural Inclusion Project; 2.2. Eugenic Legacies and the Equity of Employment: Curating a “Fair” Deal for D/deaf, Disabled and Neurodivergent Museum Professionals; 2.3. Between Teaching and Society: Sharing Inclusive, Multisensorial Strategies from Users to Architects; 2.4 Decolonial Approaches to Disability History and Heritage: Asserting the Disabled Gaze; 3. ARCHIVES AND COLLECTIONS -- 3.1. Accessing and Narrating d/Deaf Heritage in Eastern Europe; 3.2. The Heritage of Medical and Welfare Disabilities in Japan: Social Significance and Challenges; 3.3. “Peg Legs”, Black servants, and other “strange varieties of mankind”: Intersections of disability and race in the Hans Würtz Collection; 3.4. Embracing Filth: Bedpans and the Body at the Winterthur Museum; 4. CREATING CONTEMPORARY HERITAGE -- 4.1. Access Performance as Disability Heritage: Lettering Club Culture in Amsterdam; 4.2. Deaf Culture and Heritage in Performance: Locating Deaf Theatre in Ireland's Cultural Landscape; 4.3. The Luxury of Memory: Navigating Absences and Gaps in Creating Australia’s First Disability Arts Archive; 5. DIFFICULT HISTORIES -- 5.1. Unveiling the Unseen: Disability Heritage in Religious Archives; 5.2. Changing Views on Medical Film and Photography: The Van Gehuchten Collection in Twentieth-Century Belgium; 5.3. Sites of Conscience, Disability and Heritage: Looking Back to Transform the Future; 5.4. Reading Psychiatric Hospital Cemeteries Madly; 6. HERITAGE ACTIVISM -- 6.1. Heritage as Disability Activism: Embodied Engagement, Crip Hacking, and the Disabled Expert; 6.2. Deaf History, Community and Heritage: A Participatory Research Perspective; 6.3. History as a Weapon: Disability Archives and the Fight for our Future; Index.