We here at Disability Justice + Public History were thrilled to kick off our 2020 activities with a collaborative event involving the University of Oregon School of Architecture & Environment’s Portland Programs and the University of Minnesota’s College of Design. The event, Care Practices, held at UO’s White Stag Building in Portland, gave us a great opportunity to connect with emerging collaborators and spark interest in future connections.
This event posed the following question: “How is care sited and how can it be scaled?” Themes of repair, relief, recovery, maintenance, access, and sustainability threaded through many of the thought-provoking presentations hosted by the exchange and workshop. It proved to be a meaningful intellectual context for asking how visions of more humane cities might be informed by insights from Critical Disability Studies, which was the focus of our team’s contribution to the event.
Gail Dubrow gave a presentation on February 21 entitled “Critical Disability Studies and the Caring City.” Her talk focused on the ways tenets of Critical Disability Studies might help create cities where everyone may thrive. This presentation will be archived under the “Resources” page of this website. She observed:
“Within the context of architecture, planning, and design putting issues of human ability and disability into the center of our thinking is a powerful standpoint for imagining livable homes, neighborhoods, and cities. Indeed, it offers a helpful corrective for urban visions that are pitched toward the most able bodied, affluent, desirable, employable, autonomous individuals — who operate already in a sea of consumer options — that stand in for the majority of humans. In contrast, utilizing critical disability studies as a lens has the potential to create a perspective where the most disadvantaged people will also thrive within the city.”
Saturday’s session, which explored the implications of Care Practices for teaching, research and community engagement, provided the Twin Cities part of the team with an opportunity to test our long-distance conferencing capacity via Zoom, a key design feature of future collaborations. Fortunately for everyone involved, all the associated technology worked like a charm – a good sign for future long-distance, accessible collaborative work! Shana Crosson presented information about the CDS + PH website, intended as a content-hosting platform for cross-organizational collaboration. Laura Leppink and Sarah Pawlicki spoke about possible sites for the collective to examine in the context of an upcoming Spring 2021 course tentatively entitled Disability Histories as Public Histories. This course will be taught at both the University of Oregon and the University of Minnesota, creating an abundance of opportunity for cross-campus communication and collaboration. Ranging from Minnesota’s Charles Thompson Memorial Hall to Oregon’s Fairview Training Center, there are a whole host of historic sites that may provoke questions about richer historic interpretation techniques, more spatial justice-oriented preservation methods, and fairer and more sustainable urban development practices.
In preparation for this technologically-facilitated conversation, the Minnesota contingent of the partnership wrote and designed a story map focused on Minnesota and Oregon. The site features sites of disability history that hold promise as future case studies for the collaborative. How might we better interpret (or re-interpret) and preserve these listed sites? What questions do these places prompt about heritage preservation, urban management, or sustainable and accessible design? What new insights might bringing disability histories more fully into the public sphere provide us? We will add to and revise the story map throughout the upcoming years of our collaboration. As it currently stands, the website is primarily a launching pad to the creation of more in-depth case studies about sites of disability history.
We are thankful for the opportunity to bring partners in this collaborative together to learn from each other, reflect on fascinating questions, and connect across institutions! We look forward to working with our current and future partners.
Onwards and upwards!
