Public Disability History

By Iain Hutchison Seeing Our History is a Heritage Lottery Fund-supported research project conducted in 2014/15 by the Royal National Institute of the Blind-Scotland and aided in practical terms by Lothian Health Services Archive and the National Records of Scotland. The basis of the project was a Register of Outdoor Blind people living in Edinburgh and the southeast of Scotland between 1903 and 1910. The Register had been poorly compiled with many incomplete entries, but this gave added incentive to research volunteers in their quest to reconstruct the lives of outdoor blind people – people living in their communities and beyond the patronage of the Edinburgh Blind Asylum and its workshops. Members of the Seeing Our History research team (Photo: Iain Hutchison) The project team, consisting of research volunteers some of whom have sight loss, Dr Iain Hutchison, the project research historian, and Dr Catriona Burness, RNIB-Scotland’s senior research officer, had several potent...

By  Daniel Blackie The clue is in the name. Public disability history is ultimately about getting people – the public – to think about disability history. Simple as that. Only it’s not really that simple, is it? As I’ve found out over the past few years, doing public disability history is actually quite challenging. The first, and most important, thing to consider is how to reach the public? During the  Disability and Industrial Society  project I learned that there are many ways to do this and that the best public engagement strategies employ as many of them as possible. For example, our public engagement programme included a touring museum exhibition, public lectures, panel discussions and workshops, as well as regular blogposts, tweets, podcasts and pieces in the popular media. Although very different formats, all involved writing to greater or lesser extents. The text for the panels displayed in the exhibition, the notes for lectures, the emails back-and-forth w...