Exhibiting Disability Activist History

“Disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it.”
(Baynton, 2001:52)

“Exhibiting Activist Disability History” is an exciting new course offered by Ryerson’s School of Disability Studies. Taught by Melanie Panitch, Catherine Frazee and Kathryn Church, the course illuminates the historical struggles of people with disabilities and their allies by producing a curated public exhibition. It takes up critical debates and asks “What is history?” and “Who gets to make it?”

In February, 20 graduate and undergraduate students, community activists, alumni and faculty came together for the first of two three-day intensive sessions. The “price of admission” was an “object” meant to signify a particular era or moment in Canadian disability history. Over the next few months, students will analyze and transform these objects into individual displays and installations under the guidance of the course directors, disability activists, historians, artists and museum curators. These installations will be curated as an exhibition of Canadian Activist Disability History in a display that will illuminate forms of resistance to the discrimination and marginalization of disabled people. The entire exhibit will be mounted at the Abilities Arts Festival in October, 2007.

Applicants submitted a 250-word statement in which they described an object they proposed to feature in their project and explained how this object held historical significance in Canada. Students proposed a stunning collection of items:

- The grey sweatsuit so strongly associated with institutional monotony and confinement
- A poster highlighting the intersection between disability activism and work
- Photographs of disability rights activism on Parliament Hill
- Personal disability narratives from patient records at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane
- Newspaper clippings of significant moments in disability history
- Assessment tools for intelligence testing
- Newsletters of disability organizations
- A 1948 Program from the Montreal Shriners’ Hospital for Crippled Children
- Mechanical devices from respirators and iron lungs
- Editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM)

Some extraordinary lecturers, activists and experts in such disciplines as history and museum studies have helped to illuminate important intersections in this new terrain of exhibiting activist disability histories. Ryerson historian Dr. Arne Kislenko, winner of the 2005 TVO best lecturer award in Ontario, lectured on “The art and practice of history as a discipline and the importance of situating ourselves in history.” Legendary Canadian activist Jim Derksen drew from his own experience to lecture on “An Activist Life: Key Moments.”

Jim began with an account of turning points that made him an activist. He drew upon a pivotal example from the months he spent as a youth in an iron lung, where he learned the valuable lesson that only by speaking in unison with his roommates – which meant regulating their voices with the compressions of the iron lung – could they be heard by the hospital staff. He also recalled the social activism so associated with being a part of the Company of Young Canadians in the 1960s. He reflected on his activist life:

“I never set out to be an activist. Most people who end up being designated that way don’t set out to do that. The fact is you have to believe something can be changed and that when your values are outraged by the way people are being treated that you can do something to alter that constructed reality.”

Jim brought his own object, a Canadian flag in a dusty plastic bag, presented to him 15 years ago by a federal minister in recognition of his disability activism around the Omnibus Bill. Jim’s flag will form part of the exhibit to represent all that is noble about the quest for disability equality in Canadian society and how what has been achieved is more symbolic than substantive.

The course was designed to explore the significance of objects in disability history, to contribute to knowledge of disability history in Canada, and to learn how to work with objects to communicate, produce and illuminate a hidden history. In so doing, it illuminates why advocacy efforts to remove unjust social barriers remain important today.


Mark Your Calendars!

Harriet McBryde Johnson, lawyer, author and freedom fighter, will visit Ryerson’s Institute for Disability Studies on May 11, 2007, for a public reading and discussion. Don’t miss this opportunity to meet one of the leading pundits of the Disability Rights Movement! Read updates at www.ryerson.ca/ds/RBCWritersRead or call Paris Master-McRae at 416-979-5000, ext. 7037.