About this Event
Join the UK Disability History and Heritage Hub and the British Library to explore disability histories. Presentations and posters will highlight disability stories within the British Library collections, as well as wider projects and spaces, creating room for conversations around access, history, and future directions. The presentations will be available to attend in-person at the British Library, or virtually via Zoom.
In the afternoon, you will get hands-on with selected material from the British Library collections in an interactive session! You will be invited to think creatively: making zines or collages, sharing stories, and discussing themes that emerge. The focus will be on co-creation and collaboration, giving everyone the opportunity to reflect on how disability surfaces in the collections. Discussions will hopefully help shape the agenda for a future PhD placement at the British Library, which will draw focus to disability histories in the collections. Due to the nature of the activity, the afternoon session will be in-person only.
Programme:
9:30 - 10:00: Arrival and Registration
10:00 - 10:20: Welcome and Introduction
10:20 - 10:50: 10-minute presentations
- Tilly Guthrie: Touching the archive: embossed texts in archival collections
- Efia Osafo-Maafo: Veiling the Ghost: PMDD, Hauntology and the Limits of the Archive
- Daniel Blackie: How should cultural heritage folks approach disability history?
10:50 - 11:00: Break
11:00 - 11:30: 10-minute presentations
- Pierre Von-Ow: Notes from Nicholas Saunderson’s lectures on optics at the British Library
- Fiona Slater: Disability histories in national collections
- Anna Derksen: A Deaf Collective at the Polar Library in Copenhagen: Disability, Classification, and Postcolonial Arctic Knowledge
11:30 - 11:40: Break
11:40 - 12:10: 10-minute presentations
- Anna Freed: Disability and Enslavement in Runaway Slave Advertisements
- Beckie Rutherford: “To this day, I don’t see anything else like it" Historicising the UK’s first disability liberation magazine
- Hilary Buxton: Reject, Repair, Remake: South Asian Prosthetic Users in the India Office Records.
12:10 - 12:20: Break
12:20 - 13:05: 15-minute presentations
- Helen Stratford & Caitjan Gainty: The Ins and Outs of (Un) Productivity
- Suchitra Chatterjee & Mary L. Shannon: Billy Waters as a ‘Disability Trailblazer’: Addressing Histories of Race and Disability in Curatorial Practice
- Sarah Peter, Kate Allen, & Ajay Choksi: Towards an inclusive archive: widening access through participation, collaboration and learning from lived experience
13:05 - 14:00: Lunch
14:00 - 15:00: Exploration of British Library collections
15:00 - 15:15: Break
15:15 - 16:15: Zine making/creative output production
16:15 - 16:30: Closing remarks
There will also be presentations in the form of posters from:
- Amy Stone
- Daisy Holder
- EK McAlpine
- Maggie Hoffmann
- Mae Murphy
- Megan Schlanker
Posters will also be viewable remotely on a Padlet sent to attendees.
This event is taking place on the 27th November at the Knowledge Centre at the British Library, which is a fully wheelchair-accessible venue. We will have BSL interpretation and Speech-to-Text-Reporting throughout the day’s presentations. BSL interpretation can be extended to the afternoon session - please do let us know in the accessibility section when booking! Likewise, if you require a hearing loop, please let us know there. We have a few adjacent rooms booked at the venue, one of which will function as a Quiet Space.
If you need to contact us about anything, please do so on: [email protected]
We have a small number of spaces for in-person attendance at the British Library. Please do feel free to choose this option if you can make it to London!
For those who can't make it to London, there is also an online attendance option. This will be facilitated via Zoom, and will give you the chance to enjoy the presentations from wherever you are.
Event venue & nearby stays
The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London, United Kingdom
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.