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  • Packing Disability into the Historian’s Toolbox:On the Merits of Labour Histories of Disability
  • Dustin Galer (bio)
Susan Burch and Michael Rembis, eds., Disability Histories (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2014)
Nancy J. Hirschmann and Beth Linker, eds., Civil Disabilities: Citizenship, Membership, and Belonging (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)

Disability and labour historians have a lot in common. Both fields work from an interdisciplinary framework, have scholarly roots in social movement activism, are politically left-leaning, are critical of the economic and political status quo, focus on socially-constructed barriers, and foreground working and marginalized figures in a more inclusive academic discourse. Born of different generations, labour historians and disability studies scholars broke away from a stifling parent academic discourse – one as part of the New Left movement, another from the corners of medical history. Vigorous criticism of contemporary and historical structures that control and oppress marginalized populations is perhaps the strongest link connecting these disciplines.

In 2012, disability historian Geoffrey Reaume observed, “Disability history in Canada, incorporating the perspectives of disabled people using a critical theoretical approach based on rights and inclusion, not charity and pity, is new in this country as elsewhere.”1 Reaume concluded, “Whatever form our past takes in the future, we can only interpret it if we make a deliberate effort to maintain and continue to collect our documentary heritage that is all too easily forgotten and discarded – like so many disabled people were in the [End Page 257] past and still are today.”2 Disability history is a subfield of “critical disability studies,” which distinguishes itself from the vast array of literature about disability, primarily in the fields of medicine and rehabilitation, by centring analysis on the subjective experience and agency of people with disabilities within a socially constructed environment rather than the “objective” projections of others, which are usually nondisabled professionals writing from their respective fields. An example of this contrast includes the difference between a study based on interviews with former patients on their experience of living in an institution grounded in their own words versus an institutional history of a particular institution surveying changes in the application of various medical and therapeutic interventions.

By the 1990s, some scholars – often connected with the disability rights movement – began to challenge the absence of disabled peoples’ voices in mainstream academic discourse and historiography in particular. One of the earliest Canadian scholars to do this was a non-historian, Mary Tremblay, whose work analyzed the experiences of people with spinal cord injuries within rehabilitation programs and subsequent struggle with reintegration.3 Tremblay’s studies observed that most people with disabilities, regardless of the origin of their impairment, relied heavily on family support and individual resilience. Studies such as Tremblay’s demonstrated the possibilities for investigating social, economic, and cultural context surrounding disability that had been overlooked in existing historiography. Fast forward to the launch of the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies in 2012 and we see a vibrant academic community of researchers interested in researching and publishing contemporary and historical work from a critical disability studies lens. Reaume’s essay in the inaugural issue points to precipitous growth in the field of disability history in Canada and elsewhere since the 1990s, as well as major gaps and opportunities that remain in the historiography.

Two recent anthologies in disability history reveal this enormous potential for including disability as an effective analytical lens in labour history. Disability Histories (2014) edited by Susan Burch and Michael Rembis, and Civil Disabilities (2015) edited by Nancy Hirschmann and Beth Linker contain some of the most recent works in Canadian and American disability history that incorporate critical perspectives of disability and labour. Disability can provide labour history new insights about such varied topics as class, gender, race, and ethnicity, social movement activism, citizenship and civic engagement, unions, constructions of work, institutionalization, and precarious [End Page 258] employment. A survey of pieces that touch upon or focus on aspects of labour history serve to provide a glimpse at some of the work being done in this field, indicating opportunities to revisit well-studied topics with fresh eyes in addition to forging ahead in completely new areas.

Intersectionality, particularly the ways...

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