J. A. Charlton Deas: Making Museums Accessible--A Century Ago

A young girl wearing a white pinafore and boots, using her hands to examine various ornithological specimens in a museum gallery; from the Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums uploads to Flickr Commons.

There have been several recent conferences on making museums accessible to blind patrons--and next month (October) is Art Beyond Sight Awareness Month--but the project of opening museum collections and art education to blind visitors, students, and scholars is much older than some might assume.

John Alfred Charlton Deas was curator at the Sunderland Museum in the 1910s. When he retired from that position, he looked into opening the museum's eclectic holdings to the students at the nearby blind school--and his efforts were met with enthusiastic encouragement. Soon, the museum was holding events that allowed the students to handle armor, zoological specimens, skeletons, paintings, sculptures, antique weapons, and vases, among other items. These sessions happened during times when the museum was otherwise closed to the public, like Sunday afternoons. Beyond the tactile experience, docents were present to give verbal information aloud, where the written labels were of little use. Lectures by local experts were arranged, for further information. Back at school, the students made clay figures based on what they touched and learned at the museum. The children's teacher wrote, "With minds better stored than their predecessors, they ought to be keener observers, better workers and more intelligent citizens." For some sessions, blind adults were also invited to participate. Deas published a paper on his efforts in 1913, but the idea didn't find many imitators at the time.

Natural History magazine ran an article on an American version of the concept in 1914. They reported that the American Museum of Natural History (in New York) started working with blind schools in 1909, by lending them models and giving guest lectures. In 1910 a fund was established to support field trips from blind schools and institutions to the museum, and to sponsor visiting exhibits from the museum to the schools.

A photographer recorded the 1913 tactile museum experiences run by Deas, and the Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums has made a set of 38 images available (with no-known-copyright status) on Flickr Commons.

CFP: Cripples, Idiots, Lepers, and Freaks: Extraordinary Bodies/Extraordinary Minds

Call for Papers

Cripples, Idiots, Lepers, and Freaks:

Extraordinary Bodies / Extraordinary Minds

Thursday, March 22 – Friday, March 23, 2012

The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Could disability be, as Susan Wendell writes, “valued for itself, or for the different knowledge, perspective, and experience of life” it gives rise to? This conference seeks to continue—and to expand—conversations about the cultural meanings and possibilities of impairment, as well as the ways that the disabled body becomes a locus for uneasy collaborations and tensions between the social and the scientific. What critical and theoretical perspectives can be brought to bear on human variations that are, or have been, subject to medical authority or understood as requiring
intervention?

Emphasizing an interdisciplinary approach to “disability,” we seek papers from across the humanities (English, art history, music, etc.), social sciences (history, sociology, political science, etc.), and applied fields (law, education, medicine, etc.). We welcome papers on topics ranging
from the aesthetics of illness in medieval literature to the politics of disability in South Park, from the cultural fascination with autistic savants to race, impairment, and spectatorship in freak shows.

Possible paper topics include:

Genre, Aesthetics, and Disability: poetics; visual art, photography, and spectatorship; life writing and illness narratives; metaphors and representations of disability; disability and performance; “outsider art”; impairment and artistic production; comedy and disability

Pedagogy and Disability: teaching disabled authors; writing the body; student embodiments, teacher embodiments; “coming out” and “passing”; disability and composition studies; “special” education

Sexuality, Desire, and Disability: pleasure and the extraordinary body; voyeurism; fetishism; freak shows; sexual practices; queering disability

Epistemology, Subjectivity, and Disability: genius and savantism; the body in pain; affect; “terminal” illnesses; acquired impairments, congenital impairments; stigma and otherness; autistic minds; mental “illness” / mental “health”; trauma, violence, and disability

Intersections of Identity: masculinity and disability; femininity and disability; pregnancy, motherhood, and impairment; race and disability; class and disability; queer identities and disability

History of/and Disability: historicizing disability; historically specific impairments (e.g. hysteria); period-specific studies of disability (e.g. early modern); eugenics; race and/as impairment; evolution and “degeneration”; taxonomy and natural history

Medicine, Science, and Impairment: medicalizations of race, class, sex, body size; addiction and disability; medical and scientific discourse; doctor / patient interactions; concepts and problems of the “cure”; diagnostic manuals and other taxonomies; the human / animal divide

Disability Activism / (Bio)politics: rhetorics of “disability”; activist art; reproductive rights; genetics and eugenics; euthanasia; healthcare; war, disability, and the making of populations; impairment-specific campaigns and organizations

Technology and the Impaired Body: technologies of reproduction; cyborgs; prosthesis; body augmentation / body modification

Please submit 250- to 500-word abstracts to ESAConference2012@gmail.com by December 5, 2011.

* * *

The conference, sponsored by the English Student Association of the CUNY Graduate Center, will feature concurrent graduate panels on the afternoon of Thursday, March 22, and all day on Friday, March 23. It will also include a Thursday evening plenary panel on the present and future of Disability Studies; panel members include CUNY scholars Sarah Chinn (English,
Hunter College), Victoria Pitts-Taylor (sociology, Queens College), Talia Schaffer (English, Queens College and the Graduate Center), and Joseph Straus (music, CUNY Graduate Center). Keynote address on Friday evening TBD. All conference events will take place at the CUNY Graduate Center in midtown Manhattan.

If you have any questions, please email the conference co-chairs, Marissa Brostoff, Andrew Lucchesi, and Emily B. Stanback at ESAConference2012@gmail.com.

September 1: Phyllis Wallbank (b. 1918)

Born on this date in 1918, English educator Phyllis Wallbank. She worked with displaced children as a young woman in wartime London, and knew she wanted to find a way to make that her profession; a chance to hear Maria Montessori speak became the means to that end. Wallbank is one of the UK's best-known proponents of the Montessori method. In 1948 she opened Gatehouse School on the grounds of a church, and a major feature of the program was the inclusion of disabled children, at a time when few educational opportunities were available. Said Phyllis Wallbank (source):

"We incorporated mentally and physically challenged children at a time when they were normally segregated. We had groups of eight called 'families', each incorporating one disabled child. The child adapted to normality instead of to an institution. We eventually had all kinds of challenged children: children suffering from blindness, autism, maladjustment, thalidomide, Downs syndrome, cerebral palsy, brain damage and epilepsy. We had a social mix too: many children from professional families, some taking Common Entrance and public school scholarships and some local East Enders with parents known to have serious criminal backgrounds. And yet it all worked! Children were assisted and looked after by their friends and became an integral part of their "family". Often parents had no idea that a fellow student who came up in conversation at home was a disabled child."

Wallbank turns 93 today. Just a few years ago she went on an international lecture tour; one of her lectures in the US is on YouTube, in ten parts, here (there's no transcript, however).

Call for links, September Disability Blog Carnival

A carnival edition is set for September 27th. Here's the call... short version, extracted by the host herself, below:

"...I've decided to provide a non-compulsory theme to help out those who feel they want it: Being Seen. It's something I'm struggling to work out for myself, so I figured I'd ask how you all are handling it - How do you want to be seen? How are you seen? Do you feel invisible? What aren't people seeing that they need to see? Are you looking for a way to get noticed, or are you hoping that nobody will?

Please don't feel like you have to stick to my theme, though: if you've got something to say, I will find a way to make sure it's included. Since I don't tweet, and my FB is obviously off-limits because of anonymity, you can either leave a comment here (at www.neverthateasy.blogspot.com) with your e-mail or a link. Looking forward to all the entries... "

Call for links, August Disability Blog Carnival

Here's the call. August host lifeofthedifferentlyabled has an email address to send submissions to; they'll be accepted until August 20th; suggested theme is "courage."

Disability Blog Carnival update

Here's the latest: Spaz Girl (Cara) has the call for the June Disability Blog Carnival, with the theme "community," which she's hosting. She'd love to have submissions by June 25.

And it's time to recruit hosts for the rest of 2011. We do a monthly carnival these days, so we need six hosts, July-December. Who's in? Leave comments, I'll update this post as we fill slots.

UPDATE 7/26: The June Carnival may not have happened (though I've seen a good number of submissions in the comments at Butterfly Dreams)? And it's too late for July. But here are some host assignments based on the comments here...

AUGUST: Life of the Differently Abled (confirmed!)
SEPTEMBER: Never That Easy (confirmed!)
OCTOBER: Spaz Girl (Cara) at Butterfly Dreams (confirmed!)
NOVEMBER: Martha at Believe in Who You Are
DECEMBER: After Gadget (confirmed!)

Hosts, please confirm that you can take your assigned month, in comments or by email. I think the carnival format is winding down in the day of Tumblr and Twitter, but as long as hosts are volunteering I'll keep supporting that.

Neurodiversity Symposium, 5 August 2011, Syracuse University

Found at http://neurodiversitysymposium.wordpress.com:

On August 5, 2011, Syracuse University will be hosting a regional symposium on neurodiversity and autistic self-advocacy. Neurodiversity is a concept and social movement that advocates for viewing autism as a variation of human wiring, rather than a disease. As such, neurodiversity activists reject the idea that autism should be cured, advocating instead for celebrating autistic forms of communication and self-expression, and for promoting support systems that allow autistic people to live as autistic people.

The purpose of this event is to raise public awareness of the concepts of neurodiversity and the different facets of the neurodiversity movement, and to increase understanding and dispel myths about what it means to be against curing autism. The symposium will also address the ways in which the concept of neurodiversity can be expanded beyond just autism to include other atypical forms of neurological wiring, such as ADHD, hydrocephalus, and dyslexia, to name a few.

The event will kick off Friday with a keynote by Ari Ne’eman, Founding President of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (http://www.autisticadvocacy.org/) and the Vice Chair of Engagement on the National Council on Disability (http://www.ncd.gov/). Ari’s keynote will address issues such as the history, current state, and future of the neurodiversity/autistic self-advocacy movement, and autistic self-advocacy in politics.

Following the keynote, local activists will lead panels and smaller discussion on more specific topics related to neurodiversity, such as: autistic culture, allies, neurodiverse parents, self-advocacy, popular culture/conceptions of autism, dealing with sensory difficulties while still being anti-cure, and self-empowerment through facilitated communication and other non-verbal forms of communicating.

PLEASE NOTE: This is still a work in progress. Consequently, the content of panels is subject to change somewhat in the next few weeks. The exact time at which they keynote will begin, and when the panels will be held, has not yet been decided conclusively. Any updates will be posted to this page.

Cost: FREE!!!

Registration info: Preliminary registration is now available on this site.

The Neurodiversity Symposium is sponsored by:

• The Beyond Compliance Coordinating Committee
• The SU Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies
• The SU Disability Cultural Center Initiative
• The Institute on Communication and Inclusion
• The SU School of Education
• Cultural Foundations of Education, School of Education, Syracuse University
• The Taishoff Center for Inclusive Higher Education
• The Department of Teaching and Leadership