Disability History: Looking Forward to a Better Past?, 25-26 June 2010, University of Central Lancashire, Preston

Ten years ago Douglas Baynton remarked that 'Disability is everywhere in History, once you begin looking for it, but conspicuously absent from the histories we write'.¹ Baynton's comments were part of a call for a 'new disability history' which would seek to analyse critically the ways in which past societies have given meaning to impairment and to give voice to the experiences of disabled people customarily marginalized or neglected in conventional histories. Founded in 2007 and now boasting around eighty members, the Disability History Group provides a focus for new research in the UK and further afield. In June 2010 it held its second international conference at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, organized by Martin Atherton. Featuring thirty-eight speakers arranged in parallel sessions (not all of which can be discussed here), papers showcased new perspectives on physical, sensory and mental disabilities and reflected well the diverse range of subjects and approaches currently embraced by the field.

The conference theme, 'Looking forward to a Better Past?', encouraged participants to reflect on how far the 'new' disability history had come in providing greater understanding of disabled people's experiences in the past and of how discourses of disability have changed over time, changing modes of oppression, and in showing how taking a 'disability perspective' might shed new light on familiar historical topics. These themes were brought together in Cathy Kudlick's opening keynote address, which focused on the smallpox epidemic that swept across eighteenth-century Europe and left thousands of people disfigured or blind. Kudlick (University of California, Davis) explored the role of epidemic disease in the production and conceptualization of disability in the past. While it has been customary to view disability as failure or personal tragedy, the often fatal nature of smallpox meant that those who escaped with facial scarring or the loss of sight might be considered fortunate — survivors rather than victims. Moreover, a disability perspective on epidemics takes us beyond the focus on the acute stages of diseases (often the subject of medical history), to explore their impact on the social fabric.

Kudlick's contribution demonstrated the importance of an integrated approach to the history of disability, of moving beyond the familiar dichotomy in Disability Studies between a 'medical' model that concentrates on disability as an individual pathology or personal tragedy and a 'social' model in which disability is the product of social and material factors, prejudice and oppression. Similarly Daniel Blackie (University of Helsinki) emphasized the value of considering disability as a policy category (a 'state-centred' perspective) alongside a cross-impairment analysis of the lived experience of disabled people and the material conditions that shaped their lives. Such an approach is highly valuable, but raises key questions: how do we access the experiences of people who have left few records of their own? What were the cultural contexts in which these experiences and social policies evolved? How can we locate disability outside the walls of institutions and in society at large? These were issues explored by many of the conference participants.

Analyses of the experiences of disabled people took either a community or a biography based approach. The merits of a community approach, which focuses on the identity and experiences of people with shared impairments, were illustrated by Laura Snell (Lancaster University), who presented part of her doctoral research on technology and deaf identities. Using interviews with young people who had been fitted with cochlear implants to ameliorate hearing, Snell explored the impact of supportive technology not just as something which attempted to 'cure' disabling symptoms, but in terms of how it shaped the identity of young deaf people. Deaf identity was also explored by Martin Atherton (University of Central Lancashire), who used newspapers such as the British Deaf News to investigate the ways in which deaf people forged an identity as a minority group living outside the world of speech rather than as 'disabled', demonstrating in the process the complex relationship between impairment and disability. Eva Simonsen (University of Oslo) took a more theoretical approach...