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DISPATCH FROM ABROAD: EUROPE
This issue’s dispatch comes from Daniel Blackie, a doctoral candidate at the University of Helsinki. He can be contacted at daniel.blackie@helsinki.fi.
I'm writing a social history of disabled Revolutionary War veterans living in the early United States (c. 1776-1840) based largely on an examination of their disability pension files. In doing so, I'm seeking to add to our, as yet, very limited understanding of the construction and experience of disability in pre-industrial Western societies. Topics addressed in my thesis include the legal construction of disability in the early American republic, the economic and family lives of disabled veterans, and the ways in which veterans understood and employed their identities as disabled pensioners.
My work is not entirely representative of what's going on in Europe at the moment. In some ways, I'm actually a bit of an anomaly, in that my research interests lie in American disability history. Most European disability historians I have come across seem to be working on non-American topics. I do share with many of my European colleagues an interest in the history of disabled veterans, though. Indeed, veteran studies seem to be one of the growth areas in disability history in Europe. First World War veterans are particularly well studied in this respect. Other topics receiving quite a lot of attention from European disability historians are the history of special education, disability policy, and the institutionalisation (and de-institutionalisation) of disabled people.
Regardless of the precise focus of research, however, I think it's fair to say that these are exciting times for disability history in Europe. The field is represented at all levels in the historical profession from postgraduate students like myself, to post-doc researchers and lecturers, right up to the professorial level. As far as I'm aware, though, a chair in disability history has yet to be established. Surveying the recent achievements in the field, however, I'm confident this situation will change in the future.
For me, the standout disability history event in Europe of the last couple of years was the “Enabling the Past” conference held at the University of Manchester in June 2005. Organised by Julie Anderson and Ana Carden-Coyne this was, at least to my knowledge, the first ever full conference in English dedicated entirely to disability history - a major achievement and one that Julie and Ana should be very proud of. The conference comprised three thought provoking and wide ranging plenary sessions featuring talks by Paul Longmore (San Francisco State University), Jeffrey Reznick (National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM, Washington, DC), and Zina Weygand (Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris) and nineteen paper presentations organised into seven panels looking at topics ranging from disabled people's dress to the leisure activities of Deaf people. While understandably dominated by UK based scholars, given the venue location, the conference had a good international flavour, with participants also coming from North America, France, Finland, and Belgium. Those of you interested in learning more about this important conference might want to look at Neil Pemberton's summary in the History Workshop Journal, Issue 61 (2006), 292-5.
Out of Julie and Ana's conference has grown a genuine feeling of collegiality among quite a few disability historians in Europe (and North America). This is sure to bring benefits for the field in the future. As I write this piece, in fact, a Disability History Group is being formed under the auspices of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. This will hold its inaugural conference in southwest England at the end of June. Also sponsored by the SSHM is the "Children, Disability, and Community Care from 1850 to the Present Day" conference, which will be held in October at the University of Swansea.
For information on these and other conferences go to: http://www.sshm.org/confs.html.
The biennial meeting of the Nordic Network on Disability Research will take place in Gothenburg, Sweden (10-12 May). Held in English, this is a good forum for scholars of disability from outside Scandinavia to learn what their Nordic colleagues are working on. The meeting usually features a number of papers on disability history, though the conference programme is not out yet. Further details, when they become available, can be found at the conference website at: http://www.nndr2007.com/.
Recent achievements on the publishing front also bode well for the future of disability history in Europe. Shortly after the “Enabling the Past” conference, for instance, a special issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research appeared. (For details, see: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/15017419.asp). This showcased articles by Scandinavian disability historians, and provided the Anglophone world with a much needed introduction to the types of disability histories currently being produced in the Nordic countries. Eva Simonsen's contribution, entitled 'Disability History in Scandinavia: Part of an International Research Field', is particularly useful in this respect.
Disability historians on both sides of the Atlantic have tended to display a penchant for the most recent periods of history in their work, though there is growing evidence of studies covering more distant periods. Two recently published books, Irina Metzler's Disability in Medieval Europe (Routledge, 2006) and David Turner and Kevin Stagg's edited collection, Social Histories of Disability and Deformity: Bodies, Images, and Experiences (also Routledge, 2006) give extensive coverage to periods long before the twentieth-century. These books suggest that disability history is beginning to mature as a field. It is, after all, imperative that we extend the scope of disability history beyond the industrial and post-industrial West if we are to gain a better understanding of the historically and culturally contingent nature of disability.