Writing disability into European memory cultures

The project seeks to contribute to the creation of a more inclusive memory culture by writing the memories of disabled people into mainstream European history. In the 1970s, when defining their objectives; pioneers of women´s history playfully claimed that they wanted to write herstory. In a comparable way, this project seeks to contribute to the writing distory. Historians of sexuality sought to ´queer´ the field of memory studies by challenging and re-evaluating traditional, often heteronormative narratives of the past through the lens of a marginalized community. In an analogous way, this project seeks to ´disable´ existing European narratives through the discovering and integrating of the perspectives of disabled citizens.

Research on the history of disabled people has been fragmented across different sub-disciplines. Both the interdisciplinary field of disability studies and the field of disability history have been dominated by Anglophone scholarship, which not only focuses almost exclusively on the British and American context, but also tends to universalize it. This project seeks to ´Europeanize´ and diversify those theoretical perspectives.

One of the challenges of adopting a pan-European framework is to integrate local and national experiences into a more comprehensive narrative, paying attention to transnational developments. This will be addressed by undertaking a pilot project on ´Italy in an international context´ as a case study. If successful, this experiment will be of use for similar initiatives.