Social-contextual understandings of disability
Our approach has drawn on disability studies scholarship and been informed by that scholarship’s relationship to the disability rights movement. We have been influenced, in particular, by social-contextual (as opposed to medicalised) ways of understanding disability, that have been so central to underpinning rights activism across the world, to help us to frame and interpret the lives of disabled people in our museum practice. Where medicalised approaches, dominant throughout the twentieth century, have focused attention on physical and mental impairments – seeking solutions in interventions aimed at fixing, curing, or otherwise restoring individuals to a perceived idealised norm – social-contextual approaches, that emerged in the 1970s, offered a radical new way of understanding difference (Sandell 2019).
Originated by disabled scholar and activist Mike Oliver, the social model of disability is a key conceptual tool for the advancement of disabled people’s rights. Rejecting an individualist, medicalised and deficit understanding of disability that primarily locates the ‘issue’ with the individual (and their impairment); it instead asserts that it is society (and its attitudes and environment) that disables people. The social model identifies disabling attitudes and barriers as oppressing and limiting life opportunities and constraining access to all aspects of social, political, economic and cultural life (Barnes, Mercer and Shakespeare 1999). The responsibility for addressing these barriers falls on society as a whole.
As we work to apply the social model of disability in the heritage and cultural sector, we need to undo prejudice and address silences, generate deeper, richer and more empathetic approaches to the lives of disabled people and continually work to understand, convey and respect the real lived experience of the people whose stories we tell.
Ethical guidance
The Research Centre for Museums and Galleries is increasingly co-creating and using ethical frameworks to support our action research with cultural partners. This framework was developed to support heritage organisations to ethically research and present disability histories.
Everywhere and Nowhere ethical framework
Shaped by the findings and learning from the Everywhere and Nowhere collaboration, we have developed guidance for heritage and cultural organisations that shares new ethical and inclusive ways of researching and (re)presenting stories connected to disability and the lives of disabled people. You can download a copy of the Everywhere And Nowhere: Guidance for ethically researching and interpreting disability histories here. Publication designed by They Them Studio with Everywhere & Nowhere images by artist Tony Heaton.
In this video we hear from researcher Dr Angela Stienne, a member of the Everywhere and Nowhere steering group, who shares her views on the work in the week the film launched and our ethical approach to interpreting disabled people in the past.
References:
Barnes, C., Mercer, G. & Shakespeare, T. (1999) Exploring Disability: A Sociological Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press
Sandell, R. (2019) ‘Disability: Museums and our understandings of difference’, in Simon Knell (ed), The contemporary museum: Shaping museums for the global now. Abingdon: Routledge