Navigating Disability in 19th-Century America: A Student-Created Online and In-Person Exhibit at the Clements Library

Navigating Disability in 19th-Century America: A Student-Created Online and In-Person Exhibit at the Clements Library

Grant:
Instructional Development Fund (IDF)
Academic Year:
2021 - 2022 (June 1, 2021 through May 31, 2022)
Funding Requested:
$470.00
Project Dates:
-
Applicant(s):
ittaiorr
Overview of the Project:
This online and in-person archival exhibit is the product of a semester of work by graduate and undergraduate students enrolled in the course “Disabilities Past,” which investigated the cultural history of disability in the United States over the course of the long nineteenth century. Beginning with a long list of objects created by the experts at the Clement Library, students selected items for digitization and display, argued for their significance, placed them within larger historical shifts, and worked together to organize and interpret these items to produce historical conclusions. Along the way, they debated the limitations of the archive, theorized different approaches to exhibit design, researched best practices for ensuring accessibility both in-person and online, and engaged with live historiographical debates. Their online exhibit can be found at https://disabilitiespast.english.lsa.umich.edu. A Zoom symposium in which the students will share their findings at greater length will conclude the course on April 13, 2022.
Final Report Fields
Project Objectives:

The goals of the exhibit assignment to which the CRLT funds were dedicated were to:

  1. Provide an opportunity for students to ask questions rooted in particular archival objects and take initiative to discover the answers for themselves.
  2. Deepen students’ understanding of the historical experience of having a disability in the United States before explicit disability policies were enacted in the first half of the twentieth century in order to contextualize contemporary disability issues.
  3. Provide students with hands-on experience assembling a primary-source exhibit online using Omeka-S and in person and at the Clements Library in collaboration with professional librarians and conservators.
  4. Encourage discussions about what truly accessible design in the archive, the museum, and higher education might entail.
Project Achievements:

While existing library resources permitted students to research and contextualize their archival finds, the CRLT grant stepped in to realize the students’ desire for an accessible exhibit. As a direct result of the grant, at least one student who was hard-of-hearing benefited from the live captioning service during our final Zoom symposium. The inclusion of the song recording in our exhibit materials also allowed blind individuals visiting the Clements to have a truly immersive experience with one of the artifacts, and encouraged students to expand their definition of “primary documents” to include audio​ recordings and media that engaged other aspects of the human sensorium. The song can now be accessed permanently, along with the students’ research and high-res scans of their chosen artifacts here: https://disabilitiespast.english.lsa.umich.edu/s/disabilityin19c/page/home.

Making the exhibit accessible was a central goal for my students and led to deep discussions about the kind of choices curators might make as they present and label materials. That they were able to benefit from university funds to promote​ accessibility underlined the extent to which such discussions were not just theoretical: measures like the provision of live captioning and the diversification of archival materials beyond the visual reminded students that there is institutional support for innovative solutions to the problem of inaccessibility in higher education and beyond. I believe most of the students​ concluded the course with a sense that there is no accessibility measure that is too utopian or out-of-reach to be taken seriously.

The fact that this course culminated with a real in-person exhibit at the Clements library and was advertised and administered by library staff makes it particularly unique. The partnership was such a success that the library is now actively encouraging instructors to pursue course designs like mine to engage with students and provide them with valuable experience doing public humanities work. This upcoming semester, an introductory history course will employ the same model whereby students work all semester to create an exhibit using Clements Library materials.

Continuation:
The project will continue with the recording of the exhibit copy for audio use. Hopefully the set of online exhibits created by last semester's students will be supplemented with another set of exhibits produced by yet another class enrolled in “Disabilties Past” in the future. Our primary library liaison, Maggie Vanderford, will also collaborate with me on a roundtable for the Teaching with Primary Sources collective this fall.
Dissemination:
The exhibit (both in-person and online) and the Zoom symposium were advertised on the department's list-serv and on Twitter by the Clements Library. The Clements continued to promote the exhibit online and even on the street in a poster visible to passersby well into the summer.
Advice to your Colleagues:
For a course like this, it probably goes without saying that a good working relationship with Clements Library staff is critical to its success. Open and frequent communication, flexibility, and a willingness to learn on all sides was key to the smooth execution of this particularly daunting task. It was also incredibly important to avoid assuming prior knowledge about either curation or the theme or topic of the course on the part of students, but to nevertheless empower them to make interpretive claims about archival objects and test their theories against other evidence. The practical challenge of producing both online and in-person exhibits often threatened to overshadow the goal of fostering a meaningful interaction between students and archival materials.
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