Disability and the Archives blog: “thinking creatively in hard times”

Disability and the Archives blog: “thinking creatively in hard times”

In this blog, Philip Milnes-Smith offers a round-up of the recent Disability and the Archives Conference (hosted online by Shakespeare’s Globe) which he helped to plan.  It offered more than a diagnosis of inaccessibility to disabled people of our premises, finding aids, collections and records, and a recognition that disabled people are under-represented in those collections and records.  There was also evidence of action being taken.

I want to start with restating some truisms.  Disabled people are not a homogenous group – and not just because some of us have sensory impairments while others, for example, have cognitive, physical or mental health ones, or combinations of them.  In the present (and the future) needs are also different (and may even conflict with each other).  Because of intersecting factors like gender, race, class (and so on), it is important to remember that even similarly disabled people have varied experiences of life.  Our opinions and outlooks are likewise diverse.  But that doesn’t mean archives should just stick with business as usual.  When thinking about disability over time, beyond living memory to past societies and different cultures, we need particularly to be aware that applying modern terms to the past, and using those from the time, are both problematic.  If archivists don’t do either, however, we contribute to the perpetuation of an inaccurate and inauthentic picture of the past that lacks the disabled people who were very much there. 

Absence

As the conference’s first presentation reminded us, disabled people can be the first to censor, suppress and exclude themselves to make others feel more comfortable, thereby recentring non-disability.  Before ever an archivist or curator dismisses their papers or artworks as not significant (because they represent ‘only’ the life and work of a disabled person, unrepresentative therefore of the majority), the individual may be under societal pressures about which topics, identities and self-images are acceptable.  This paper also highlighted that limb-loss is very much not a one-off event rendered negligible thereafter by the use of a prosthetic, which has normalised the body so that it can ‘pass’ for non-disabled in every way that matters (see preview image).  Similarly, a disability aid such as a crutch, is not simply a manufactured object whose meaning was complete on the day of manufacture, but one potentially packed with stories of use and adaptation, and that has perhaps played starring roles in stories of education and growing up, romance, employment and family life.

However, it is not just that disabled people can be absent from our collections, or present only on someone else’s terms (e.g. as proof of the skills of surgeons).  Some facets of disability are also likely to have been omitted if, as is likely, the decisions have been made without input from living disabled people.  It is not merely that institutional records, for example, can view us pitiable objects of charity, but that, as a result, acts of resistance may be framed as failures to conform, rather than as assertions of civic rights.  Likewise, if your collection has room for stories of disabled people as inspirations for non-disabled people, but is missing disability joy, creativity and virtuosity the lack will be noticed by disabled users (even if not by the non-disabled). 

Access

It is always worth reminding ourselves that barriers to accessing our collections don’t start only when users have crossed the threshold into the reading room.  It can be difficult to see and understand our non-users, but perhaps we should start with those whose pain and fatigue may stop them leaving their room, let alone emerging from their front door.  For some of these, digital poverty may mean that any remote access provisions we offer are inaccessible.  For many, our freely available online catalogues are not usable finding aids – perhaps we could be clearer that they don’t work like Google so will not show near matches, for example, if your spelling is wobbly (or correct for modern times, but does not match that used in the original title).  While AI may offer a solution to that – including “nudging visitors into new territory and new areas of content that they didn’t think about exploring” – it may also reproduce and reinforce biases, without careful input from people who think disabled people matter. 

In an important panel from Deaf researchers presenting in BSL and ASL, we were reminded that Deaf materials in general collections are likely to be very partial because of the deficit-based assumption that hearing is superior to deafness (and that speaking or reading English is natural and universally accessible).  Collecting policies that start with the written word would miss major aspects of Deaf culture (and subcultures) which can arise from the community signing among themselves without leaving written evidence.  We should also be alerted to the emotional cost to the individual of having constantly to justify your presence and needs, and the real danger that any accommodations being offered are those that the hearing majority think best, and not what a sign-first person wants, genuinely needs and has clearly asked for as a reasonable adjustment.  Other speakers raised users’ own ableism (trying not to be a burden, not wanting to make a fuss) as barriers to access of which professionals were likely unaware.

Action

In terms of physical premises, we may not all have an on-site quiet room in the immediate vicinity of the reading room, but those planning new premises should be looking to include one.  Just because the reading room is likely to be hushed does not mean that there is no danger of sensory overwhelm from, for example, bright (and possibly noisy) lights, loud air conditioning and the perfume of another reader.  As Clare Jeremy argued as long ago as 2017, a separate private study area in addition to the general reading room could also be useful – where materials could be read aloud, or researchers use their talk to text note-taking software.  The recent Divergent Minds in the Archive project, mentioned in passing by one of the presenters, has customisable resources that could help ensure a consistent approach in the sector to meeting the needs of (broadly defined) neurodivergent users planning to visit and use our collections. 

If disabled researchers get next to no hits in the catalogue for search terms like disabled/disability might not they reasonably conclude that disability is not important to the institution, and that their needs might not be either?  Thematic research guides on how to find disability in our collections were mentioned as necessary several times.  Since budgets are tight, we may not all be in a position to go above and beyond such a finding aid by commissioning artists, composers and playwrights to communicate the disability stories from our collections to general audiences, particularly children and young people (whose education about disabled people and disability history remains quite limited).  This blog’s subtitle comes from the presentation about using the Billy Waters resources in the KS3 classroom – which found learners were able to identify with Billy as a mirror of their own resilience as young people in tough times.  But in giving highlight tours of our collections, for example, there is no additional financial penalty incurred by surfacing a disabled person rather than a non-disabled one. 

While commissioning tactile maps or copies of images and documents may also be beyond your budget, that does not mean you can’t consider dethroning sight (and reading) as the default senses activated in archive engagement sessions, and consider developing expertise in exploratory audio-descriptive approaches.  We also need to reconsider what an access copy or surrogate might be, and to begin thinking about having multiple formats (such as performance recordings with and without captions, and with audio-description). 

Unless the profession changes what it does, why would disabled people agree to donate their papers, to help us address the gaps in our collections?  But the alternative – disabled people building their own (likely digital) archives that have accessibility and discoverability of disability built in from the foundations up, rather than having to retrofit them as an afterthought – also presents challenges if practices have not changed.  Even if professionals are trusted to share our expertise and standards with those building new specialist repositories, there is a real danger of reproducing the ableist logic which mean, for example, it can be considerably easier to find Deaf sporting heroes than, say, deaf-blindness, or ‘super-crips’ than the lives of ordinary disabled people. 

Image Credit: 'PTSD Shopping 1968'. Ink jet on paper. Nicola Lane / 2025

Guest blogs are welcome.  Please email diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk.  We would also like to hear from you if you have found one of the Allies’ blogs helpful to your work.