“People with disabilities in the GDR” – perspectives on public history from an inclusive historical research project

By Isabell Paulick and Sebastian Balling

Disability Studies is a trans- and interdisciplinary branch of science, which emerged from the international disability movement of the 1960s and has been discussed in scientific contexts in Germany since 2001 (Köbsell, 2012; Waldschmidt, 2015). It is based on a social model of disability, according to which people are hampered by society, for example by barriers, attitudes, actions and laws. This can be understood as a criticism of the medical model according to which people are handicapped due to a "defect".  Disability Studies thus represent a human rights model of disability (Degener, 2015). The emancipatory slogan "Nothing about us without us" is at the center of Disability Studies and therefore emphasizes the active role instead of the passive role of people with disabilities in the research process.

Started in April 2002 with the founding of the nationwide working group "Disability Studies in Germany" (AGDS for short), this branch of science has been gaining in popularity in Germany since the beginning of the 21st century. In 2004, the International Research Center for Disability Studies (iDiS) was established at the University of Cologne, and in 2005 the Center for Disability Studies (Zedis) was established at the University of Hamburg. In addition, research and teaching in Disability Studies is now being conducted at various universities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The first professorship for "Sociology and Politics of Rehabilitation, Disability Studies" was created at the Faculty of Human Sciences of the University of Cologne at the end of 2008. Within the scope of these institutions, various research projects have been established and are investigating the topic of disability.

A current research project is the joint project Menschen mit Behinderungen in der DDR (People with Disabilities in the GDR), which is carried out since November 2018 in cooperation between Kiel University, Bundeswehr University Munich and the Drachensee Foundation in Kiel. The historical research project examines the life of people with disabilities in the GDR from different perspectives in four subprojects.

Subproject 1 (Families with disabilities in the GDR) focuses on the lives of families with children with disabilities. From an everyday perspective, the project tries to uncover the lived experiences of families with disabled children, e.g. in regards to the (gendered) distribution of tasks and roles within the families or their communication with state or ecclesiastical caregiving institutions. Embedded in the broader context of general political, social and cultural developments in the GDR, the project analyzes changes of family everyday-life throughout the span of life of the East-German state.

Subproject 2 (Techniques of mobility and built environment) investigates the technologies of transport and housing as well as planning and architecture as related aspects of inclusion and exclusion. It also reviews state plans and announcements for the social integration of disabled people in terms of their actual implementation in everyday life. Therefore, people from various social spheres of the former GDR are being interviewed in guideline-based interviews. These include city architects and manufacturers of aids, those involved in disability policy, and disabled people affected by the decisions of these groups.

Subproject 3 (Media representations of disability) tries to uncover the largely unknown discourses on disability in official GDR-media such as dailies and television as well as small media such as private films and Samizdat-prints. The project asks about the changes in representations of disability during the GDR’s lifespan, the political use of disability representations for state narratives and their usage by different political groups. Further research focusses on the producers of media about disability: who produced which media narratives on disability/disabilities? How big was the share of people with disabilities and their relatives and friends in the production of these representations?

Some of the sources included in the subprojects 1 to 3 will be integrated in a digital exhibition with didactically edited accompanying material in cooperation with the Drachensee Foundation in subproject 4 (Digital Exhibition/Production of Open Educational Resources). The close cooperation between the Drachensee Foundation and the Kiel Institute for Inclusive Education is a central point in the project implementation and in particular in the creation of the digital exhibition. The Institute for Inclusive Education develops and implements educational programs by and with people with disabilities. In a three-year full-time qualification, people with disabilities are trained to become educational specialists. As qualified educational specialists, they convey the worlds of life, needs and specific perspectives of people with disabilities. The team sensitizes (future) teachers, specialists and management staff on an equal footing.

Education specialists of the Institute for Inclusive Education during a seminar.

In order to ensure that people with disabilities have barrier-free access to the digital exhibition, the exhibition is being worked on closely with two educational specialists from the Institute for Inclusive Education. For them, this is the first research project they are actively involved in. This gives them the opportunity to actively incorporate their life experiences and expertise as directly affected people with disabilities into the research process. The educational specialists perceive this as an opportunity for a change of perspective. People with disabilities are not only perceived as research objects, but as active participants, which was not possible for a long time in this form. In particular, when creating the digital exhibition, they have the role of an expert in their own cause. The focus of this participative research should be on working at eye level with low hierarchies between project participants with and without disabilities. This is an important point to keep in mind throughout the research process.

Accessibility is an important issue in the context of the Internet as well as in the context of science communication. Accessible web offers can be used by all users regardless of their limitations or technical capabilities. Thus blind and visually impaired users can read out websites by software or have them printed in Braille. Deaf or hard-of-hearing people whose first language is sign language need tailor-made, special forms of presentation on the Internet. In addition to addressing the needs of people with disabilities, accessible means that in general, non-disability users will not face any barriers.

It is also very important that the scientific content is presented in a clear and easily understandable language without distorting the source material too much. Accessibility includes setting educational, training, and intellectual standards that are not excessive but adapted to the topic – this means that highly complex sources such as submission, TV-documentaries or need to be contextualized and commented in order to make them accessible to a larger audience. This context is particularly binding on public service web sites, in order to realize the demands for equal rights also of people linguistically handicapped in one country (mother tongue deviating from the majority), but also covers the problems of older people, which are not with the possibilities and methods modern communication and socially disadvantaged classes.

If asking the educational specialists of the Institute for Inclusive Education involved in the research project about their experiences in dealing with the Internet, they report some problems. For example, the use of complicated terminology or foreign words is a problem for the comprehensibility of the contents. It was also critically noted that when using audio-visual media, the tempo of videos, for example, often cannot be set. Too fast or too indistinctly spoken texts cause contents to be harder to understand. It would also be important to use audio descriptions to allow deaf people access to audio-visual content. Illustrated descriptions of complex content and the use of plain language are also helpful. The educational specialists also criticized the presentation of some webpages. For example, a too bright or dark color choice of the Internet pages leads to the fact that the font cannot be read well. Even too confusing presentation of the control elements or content is in the way of a good understanding of the Internet pages.

The close cooperation between the educational specialists as experts acting of their own cause and the scientific staff in the research project should ensure that these points are taken into account in the creation of the digital exhibition. Moreover, in other points concerning the research project, the expertise of the educational specialists will be included in order to meet the premises of Disability Studies.



Sebastian Balling is doctoral candidate at the History Didactics Department at the University of Kiel. Isabell Paulick is an educational research scientist at the Drachensee foundation in Kiel.

__________________________

References:

Degener, T. (2015). Die UN-Behindertenrechtskonvention - ein neues Verständnis von Behinderung. In T. Degener & E. Diehl (Hrsg.), Handbuch Behindertenrechtskonvention. Teilhabe als Menschenrecht - Inklusion als gesellschaftliche Aufgabe (S. 345–351). Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung.

Köbsell, S. (2012). Wegweiser Behindertenbewegung. Neues (Selbst-)Verständnis von Behinderung. Neu-Ulm: AG SPAK.

Waldschmidt, A. (2015). Disability Studies als interdisziplinäres Forschungsfeld. In T. Degener & E. Diehl (Hrsg.), Handbuch Behindertenrechtskonvention (S. 334–344). Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung.

___________________
Recommended citation:
Isabell Paulick/Sebastian Balling (2020): “People with disabilities in the GDR” – perspectives on public history from an inclusive historical research project. In: Public Disability History 5 (2020) 1.

Read More

The blind - the special?

by Sebastian Barsch and Susan Krause

There is nothing to see in the Dialog-Museum in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, but there is much to hear, feel, smell and taste. The museum wants to show what it's like to be blind. The claim of the museum is that blindness is not simulated, but experienced as an adventure with (almost) all senses. The website says it clearly:

"In our exhibition blind guides lead small groups of guests through completely darkened rooms depicting different everyday situations. Without eyesight, the daily routine becomes a totally new experience. You will sharpen your senses. A role reversal is created: Blind people become ambassadors of a culture without pictures."

Entry to the Dialog-Museum in Frankfurt am Main.
(available under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication).

The museum is not alone with this approach. Meanwhile, there are many offers that seek to enable sighted people to "experience" blindness. Dark restaurants advertise with their absolutely dark rooms. In these rooms, the senses of the visitors should change: the "invisible" should be made "visible" with their hands, their ears, their mouths and their noses. Another example: For a TV documentary, a reporter attempted to self-test what it would be like to be blind by wearing opaque glasses and trying to cope with a supposed everyday life.

Many historical museums take other paths when dealing with blindness. As a rule, they do not try to sell blindness as a happening. Rather, they create additional information offers to enable blind visitors to visit exhibitions. For example, the "Museum of the Senses" of the "Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum Hildesheim" has created an exhibition in which not only audio guides and Braille texts accompany the exhibition. In addition, they offer exhibits that appeal to the sense of sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. For example, it can be "felt", "heard" and "smelt" as it might have been in ancient Egypt, ancient Peru or China.

Such approaches are important and good. Nevertheless, they raise some questions. Questions regarding the image of what seeing people make of people who are blind. It seems that these images are similar to the ideas children have when they shut their eyes and play "blindly". Often, the stereotype of a problematic exaggeration of the senses of blind persons is also revealed here, when it is said: If one cannot see, one can smell better. So the question is: Can seeing people really get a realistic picture of blindness?

Children playing "blind"
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Austria by Erich Schmid (talk)

Firstly, persons who are born blind do not have the reference of seeing. Therefore, they cannot compare seeing with blindness like sighted people pretend to do. For most of blind persons not using the sense of sight is a normal state. Of course, they get told that most of the people around them "see" and get explained what this so-called seeing means. They are raised in a visual culture where people talk a lot about how things look like and are visualized. So to imagine what it means to be blind sighted people would need the life-long experience and not a couple of hours or days to perceive the same way.

Besides that, there are also technical problems. No one knows how it smelled in ancient Egypt or what the sound of a city in ancient Peru was like. Such offers may revive what is actually outdated in historical science, namely the idea that "the past" could be revived.

It's a good thing that museums are trying to be inclusive as well, of course. But it will not be enough for non-disabled people to imagine how people with disabilities could perceive something "different". Sighted people will not be able to imagine how people who are blind from birth perceive the world. But if they make use of the idea that blindness could be simulated by eye-witnessing, in the end, they only strengthen their own stereotypes. Disabled people thus become objects of non-disabled again.

However, the stereotype of blind people having an increase of tactile or auditive sensitivity congenitally can easily be disproved. The developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky investigated blind children already 100 years ago. He defends that this is not a natural inherent process, like a kidney that takes the role of the failed one but rather this "indicated phenomenon […] proceeds along a very complicated and roundabout route of overall sociopsychological compensation, without substituting for or replacing the failing organ." (Vygotsky 1993: 99) He argues furthermore that their other senses seem stronger because blind persons need to do an adaption to the visual world. Therefore they practice them more. Through listening more closely or touch the Braille letters with their fingers those daily actions become more and more used to them. For Vygotsky, the biggest difference between the blind and the sighted is to be seen in their behaviour, rather than their biological disposition.

Another stereotype is that people who are blind do not have any visual images and that their world would be "dark". Referring to approaches from Neuroscience these could show that when imagining pictures, images or memories the same brain parts of both, sighted and blind persons are active. The neurologist Helder Bértolo did research on visual activations in dreams. His results show that congenitally blind persons have visual contents in their dreams and are even able to draw them. The experiment suggests the assumption that there can be visual imagery without visual perception. (Bértolo 2005: 173) So obviously there seem to be insights into the blind world of perception that sighted people are not able to see or experience.

"Blind subjects were able to represent graphically the oneiric scenes they previously described orally. No statistical differences were found between the groups." (Bértolo et al., 2003) 

Which ways would have to be gone? Inclusion can only be achieved through inclusive expertise. People with blindness should therefore not be questioned on a one-to-one basis as to whether particular offers from an exhibition are particularly important to them. Rather, they would have to be involved in the entire process of exhibition design right from the start.

As a good example, the DHM in Berlin offers special exhibitions for blind and visual impaired visitors since 2015 when developing a concept for an inclusive museum.  Before opening such an exhibition the museum educational service invites target groups to show them their projected conception. Inasmuch as pre-testing the exhibition for others they are involved in the planning process. Of course, it would be even better to include them right from the beginning. Nevertheless, it can be seen as a start in the right direction of participation and to support the idea of not talking about or planning for disabled people but of getting them on the table.

Ultimately, in the context of inclusion and thus a perspective of disability studies in museums, the question remains: do we have to continue to work with categorizations, even if categories are generally questioned? Or to put it another way: can there really be inclusive exhibitions without resorting to categories of disability? Of course, talking about the category "blind people" is not unproblematic. "Blindness" is a spectrum, and a lot of people who are said to be blind have some functional vision. To make it clear: The focus of our argumentation is on blindborn people with no visual experience. But even this group is diverse.

On the other hand: it is not only the questioning of the use of categorizations but furthermore the criticism on how society deals with blindness as such we should focus more. The cultural model of disability accepts an impairment on the body side. But beyond that, it asks for the reactions within a predominant abled society when dealing with disabilities. Certainly, there is a dichotomy that is repeated over and over again. Sighted vs. Blind. If so contrasted blind persons often appear as either victims or superheroes. Both ways are not appropriate.

Something that sighted people could actually learn from experiments of playing blind is to question the massive priority that seeing has in our culture and to challenge the concept of ability as such.

Closing with a perspective change from H.G. Wells – The country of the blind: When the main character Nuñez climbed Ecuador‘s Andes and got lost out there coincidentally he found a country where everybody was blind from birth. After observing them for a while the first thing he wanted to do was to teach the blind population how to "see". But since they did not have a concept of seeing like he did they considered him being crazy. He tried to trick them by running away assuming they could not see and therefore follow him. He tried his best to convince them that they had a deficit and that a normal state would be to "see" the world through "eyes". But neither did they believe him nor where their special perception really deficit enough to let him escape from them. They made him obey and he had to follow. In their notion, he alone was abnormal because he seemed to have tumour-like shapes in his face and was constantly talking about this so-called "seeing" which they figured must have been some kind of mental disease.



Sebastian Barsch is professor for history didactics at the University of Kiel. Susan Krause is doctoral researcher at the University of Bielefeld.
_____________________________

References

Bértolo, Helder (2005): »Visual imagery without visual perception?« In: Psicológica: Revista de metodologia y psicologia experimental Bd. 26, p.173-188.
Vygotsky, Lev (1993): »The blind child«, in: Robert W. Rieber/Aaron S. Carton (Hg.), The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky Volume 2: The Fundamentals of Defectology. Abnormal Psychology and Learning Disabilities, New York/London: Plenum Press, p. 97-109.

Recommended citation:

Sebastian Barsch / Susan Krause (2019): The blind - the special? In: Public Disability History 4 (2019) 4.

Read More