Disability Heritage

This volume engages with disability heritage as a participatory, political, relational, and unfinished practice, linking the preservation of the past to lived experience in the present as well as imagined futures. Contributors examine how disability reshapes what counts as heritage, who it is for, and how it is made, and demonstrate ways to transform institutional as well as community-based approaches.

Contributors from Ireland, Germany, Australia, the UK, Sweden, Japan, Poland, Romania, Belgium, Italy, and The Netherlands apply concepts from critical disability studies and disability history to explore participatory, activist, and decolonial practices that challenge ableist structures. Written in an accessible way and drawing on case studies from performance, museums, (digital) archives, landscapes, and architecture, chapters demonstrate how disability is embedded in histories yet rarely acknowledged as a constituting force within them. Positioning disability as integral to heritage-making, the authors show how disability actively shapes archival research, heritage practices, and what can be remembered. Topics include integrating disability perspectives in heritage education, redesigning recruitment and career trajectories, the challenges and benefits of working both within and outside of established institutions, strategies for reinterpreting objects including embodied and sensory methods, and collecting intangible heritage.

The book is aimed at scholars and students in heritage, museum, archival, disability, cultural and historical studies, as well as practitioners, policymakers, and activists. It offers conceptual tools and grounded examples for engaging disability heritage not as a bounded and stable field or object, but as a relational practice that demands attentiveness to friction and difference.