Disability Justice + Public History
Three decades of work to make historic preservation and public history more democratic and inclusive spheres of activity have evidenced remarkably little attention to issues of disability. While the Secretary of Interior’s standards address the challenges of integrating functional considerations into the treatment of historic places, scholarship focused on disability justice offers far more than guidance on the placement of wheelchair ramps and other technical specifications. It promises to disrupt and transform existing relations of power in the preservation movement by shifting the problem from nonconforming bodies to a society that has yet to recognize people with disabilities as fully human with all of the rights of citizenship.
Disability justice activism offers a paradigmatic shift relevant to architects, planners, landscape architects, and artists, as well as engaged citizens, who are committed to creating cities that meet basic human needs while accommodating the embodied differences that complicate our best-intentioned schemes for access, engagement, even delight in public places. The shift from accommodating individual deficits to recognizing how disability is constructed and maintained through normative practices merits closer interrogation to deliver on the promise of equal justice.
Beyond questions of access, disability is a subject that merits reconsideration as an interpretive theme at historic places. Franklin D. Roosevelt recently was the subject of the first detailed case study of opportunities for reinterpreting disability at a National Historic Landmark. Unlike the fields of women’s or LGBTQ history, no attempt has yet been made to identify the scope of disability-related historic properties or the issues that arise when addressing disability therein. Progressive preservationists, otherwise committed to inclusive practices at the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality, are well positioned to grapple with how new frameworks for conceptualizing disability will disrupt and inspire the transformation of standard practices in the field.
