The Portrait of a Sixteenth-Century Disabled Man

By Volker Schönwiese

Gazes at women and men with disabilities from the early modern times up until today – how can they be interpreted scientifically and artistically? A painting from an unknown disabled man from the 16th century that has not been taken notice of until then was the starting point of a participatory and transdisciplinary project in 2005/2006. The portrait is part of the “Kunst- und Wunderkammer” (Cabinet of Arts and Wonders, founded by Archduke Ferdinand II of Austria, Region of the Tyrol [1529-1595]) at Ambras Castle near the city of Innsbruck/ Austria. The Institute of Educational Sciences at the University of Innsbruck, the Museum of Fine Arts (“Kunsthistorisches Museum”) in Vienna with its collection at Ambras Castle and the Centre for Independent Living in Innsbruck were the project partners of this research project. The project´s main goals were the creation and organisation of an exhibition at Ambras Castle and the publication of a scientific anthology with collected articles. Both goals were achieved in cooperation with a reference group of women and men with disabilities. Additionally, a television documentary was created. The participatory approach of the project should finally lead to recommendations for working with reference groups as a way of transdisciplinary participation.

During the duration of the project, two other historical paintings were found that are also significant for the analysis of the cultural representation of disability: a leaflet from 1620 showing Wolfgang Gschaidter, a carpenter with a disability [1] and a small picture from 1578, showing Elizabeth, a woman with a learning disability [2].

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Polio Lives - Translating ethnographic text into verbatim theatre

By Sonali Shah

Increasingly, in today’s text-based society, there is a call to adapt and translate academic research into forms that are accessible to a diversity of stakeholders in order to accelerate its impact beyond the academic gates. Such thinking informed the Polio Lives study - a two stage pilot study which explored the potential of interdisciplinary methodologies to exchange and communicate knowledge, about the social history of polio, to different communities in creative ways. The first stage involved conducting five life history interviews with survivors of childhood paralytic polio, contracted during the U.K. polio epidemic in the 1940s and 1950s.  Selected quotes from these transcripts were used to illustrate various points throughout the paper. The second stage of the study involved collaborating with Birds of Paradise theatre company to run two workshops to explore how to tell the story of polio through recorded delivery verbatim methodologies.

For the purposes of the blog, I will omit all the theoretical debates around the use of drama as a tool to educate contemporary audiences about historical diseases which are unfamiliar to them. This can be read about in my journal paper which should be available this year. Instead I urge you to watch the short documentary, Polio Monologues, which explores how the life stories of polio survivors (specifically those with paralytic polio since childhood), collected by a social scientific disability researcher (myself) can be embodied and staged using the verbatim theatre technique recorded delivery.

Recommended Citation
Sonali Shah (2016): Polio Lives - Translating ethnographic text into verbatim theatre. In: Public Disability History 1 (2016) 7.

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Favorite TED talks about disability

By Ylva Söderfeldt

TED talks have become a hugely popular forum for public debate. The format consists of brief lectures, around twenty minutes long, presented in an entertaining, provocative, and popular way, to a live audience and openly available online. TED talks address a wide range of topics, from science, politics, and society, to personal stories. Quite a few of them relate to disability, for instance presenting high-tech protheses, or the experiences of disabled athletes. Today, we’ve selected three favorite TED talks on disability:

Alice Dreger, „Is anatomy destiny?“
Dreger is well known for her groundbreaking studies on conjoined twins and intersex. In this talk, she suggests that unusual bodies can teach us something about democracy.



Maysoon Zayid, „I got 99 problems… palsy is just one“
Zayid talks about being at the intersection between racism, sexism, ableism… and comedy!



Mads Ananda Lodahl, „Ending the straight world order“
This talk isn’t about disability at all, but Lodahl talks about how queer studies question the concept of normal, and what the consequences of enforcing normalcy are.



Most TED talks have subtitles and transcripts in several languages and the option to comment and discuss online. Enjoy, and tell us about your favorite TED talks!

Recommended Citation
Ylva Söderfeldt (2016): Favorite TED talks about disability. In: Public Disability History 1 (2016) 6.

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Online media representations of the memorial for victims of the National Socialist “euthanasia”

By Robert Parzer
Translation: Ylva Söderfeldt

Workers at the T4 memorial in Berlin. Photo © Robert Parzer.

Public discourse and collective memory have tended to neglect the National Socialist killings of mentally ill and disabled people. Still in the 1990s the position towards victims of the so-called “euthanasia”-programs was defensive, until in the early 2000s the debate surrounding the Berlin Holocaust memorial led to other victimized groups being recognized at the highest political level. This started a process that finally in 2014 led to the inauguration of the memorial for the victims of the National Socialist “euthanasia” killings. The memorial was supported by an exhibition project funded by the German Research Foundation.

Since the practice of “writing onto the internet” has become popular and commonly accepted, different online media have also become platforms for remembering Nazi crimes. However, the murdering of mentally ill and disabled people is an exception that rarely finds its way online. For instance, the Hashtag #Krankenmord [“murder of the sick”, a German term often used for the killings of mentally ill and disabled people under the Nazis] yields less than 1000 results on Instagram, probably the most popular photo platform on the web. Of course, there are exceptions, such as the platform gedenkort-t4.eu or singular projects, among which the highly professional, interdisciplinary and transcultural documentation of a field trip by George-Washington University students is worth mentioning.

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Accessible disability history - sharing the past

By Rachael Stamper

In my role as heritage project manager at Queen Elizabeth’s Foundation for Disabled People, a disability charity based in Surrey, UK, I have been exploring how to make disability history more accessible to the general public and for disabled people themselves.

Firstly I would like to talk about a conference I attended at the London Metropolitan Archives in November 2015 titled ‘Disability and Impairment – A Technological Fix?’ The aim of the conference was to share what disability organisations and researchers were doing or with disability history. The conference married together two groups of people, academics and non-academics, and both groups were represented in twelve twenty minute presentations, followed by Q&A sessions.

Academics were present from Lancaster University, The Open University, Langdon Down Museum of Learning Disability, the Wellcome Trust, The National Archives, Yale University, and The University of Exeter. They presented a wide range of topics such as the impact of 20th century computers on people with disabilities, the blind and dead in Victorian Britain 1851 – 1901, and mobility and impairment in the eighteenth century.

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How exclusive is disability history? How inclusive it may be?

By: Sebastian Barsch

Last week, to the occasion of the annual carnival festivities, the people of Cologne firmly took control over public space. As a result the Cologne city-scape became packed with colourful costumes, dancing people and a lot of laughter. In between all those manifestations of carnival one occasionally could encounter a man or woman dressed up like a person with disabilities.

Costume of Frida Kahlo in Cologne Carnival

One of those persons was my colleague Mona Massumi. She masqueraded herself as the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Frida Kahlo suffered lifelong health problems and has often been a subject of disability theory.¹ Mona decided upon this costume because for her Frida Kahlo symbolizes a “strong woman in history: despite her difficult personal circumstances (sufferings caused by her disability, infidelity of her husband and the lack of recognition as an artist) she didn't lose her passion and courage.” As Mona is quite into diversity studies, she is well acquainted with the discussions about the Mexican artist. Still, my guess is that theory was not the main reason why she chose this costume. Instead, I think her example shows that disability may have recently acquired a certain appeal, as it has become visible as opposed to hidden or simply forgotten.

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The Dr. Guislain Museum: Ten Inscriptions

By Arnout De Cleene


1.
The Dr. Guislain Museum is located in the city of Ghent (Belgium). The museum can be found in the well-preserved buildings of Belgium’s first psychiatric asylum. At first sight one would consider this an ideal situation as the museum specializes in the history of psychiatry.

2.
[1947]

3.
The Dr. Guislain Museum opened its doors in 1986. In those days visitors needed to go to the attic in one of the old buildings of the Hospice pour hommes aliénés. The Hospice was a specialized psychiatric institution founded in 1857. The institute was commonly named Hospice Guislain after its founder, Belgium’s first psychiatrist Joseph Guislain (1797-1860). Today, the Dr. Guislain Museum encompasses a permanent exhibition on the history of psychiatry, a broad collection of outsider art and temporary exhibitions on subjects related to the history of psychiatry (such as melancholia, trauma, shame, etc.). The museum tries to be a place where scientific research and expertise (on psychiatry, mental illness, madness, etc.) can be translated into (mostly visual) presentations that aim to reach a large and diverse public.
One of the intriguing and problematic aspects the museum continuously is confronted with is the following: the building used in order to present the exhibitions seems to interfere with what is being shown and how it is interpreted.

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