About
Curb cuts, wheelchairs, iron lungs, lift shoes, alarm clocks, grabbers, ramps, blankets, spectacles, scrunchies, handlebars, teddy bears…
How do objects transform a disabled person’s experience of the world?
Objects of disability are technological tools that individuals autonomously attach to their bodies or make use of, to increase their sensory and/or physical encounters with the world. They can also be things that are made either for, or as, a representation of disability. As scholar Tobin Siebers explains: “the objects that people with disabilities are forced to lived with—prostheses, wheelchairs, braces, and other devices—are viewed not as potential sources of pain but as marvelous examples of the plasticity of the human form or as devices of empowerment.”
This project follows Siebers’ lead on viewing objects of disability as “marvelous examples” of disability-led design and adaptation. We examine how objects can provide us with historical insight into people’s lived experiences of disability that are often not kept in museum or archive collections—especially disabled people’s own stories and the “low-tech” modifications they’ve made for their prostheses, devices, artifacts, stuff, things, knick-knacks, and etc.
Objects included in the database have been researched by project leaders or their students, and/or featured in physical exhibits. Essays examining the material and design histories of objects provide in-depth analysis and historical context for disability experience.
Do you have your own story of an object of disability that you’d like to share?
Send along photos and a 500-1000 word essay be added in the “Lived Stories” Essay Exhibit! Be sure to include your bio and image descriptions for the photos.
Email: ObjectsOfDisability@gmail.com
Project Leaders
Jaipreet Virdi is a historian of medicine, technology, and disability. She is based at the University of Delaware, where she is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Co-Director of the Hagley Graduate Program in the History of Capitalism, Technology and Culture; she is also an affiliate in the Center for Material Culture Studies. She is author of the award-winning Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History and co-editor of Disability and the Victorians: Attitudes, Legacies, Interventions. Graduate students in her Disability Histories seminar class explore the material and visual culture of disability design; their essays are featured in the exhibits "Design Histories" and "Marvelous Examples."
Coreen McGuire is a historian of interwar Britain doing interdisciplinary research at the nexus between disability history, medical history, and science and technology studies. She completed her PhD on the measurement of hearing loss in the British Telephone System at the University of Leeds in the Centre for History and Philosophy of Science. Following this, she took up a postdoctoral position at the University of Bristol and developed research on the historical measurement of respiratory disability as part of the Life of Breath project, a Wellcome funded project which was led jointly by Bristol and Durham. She is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century British History at Durham University and author of Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal: Setting the Standards for Disability in the Inter-War Period, which is available open access.
Support
Objects of Disability was originally funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship for Jaipreet Virdi.
Header Images:
- Dallas County Judge Quentin D. Corley with his patented prosthesis for driving, 1916. U.S. Library of Congress.
- Mr. Swift, a blind librarian, c.1913. City of Toronto Archives.
- Dorothy Brett with an electric Marconi hearing aid, 1922. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.
- Aulaqiaq, who is blind and learned to thread the needle and sew, c.1946. Library and Archives Canada.