A series of influential seminars and research projects from Liverpool Hope University have been made freely available to mark Disability History Month.
The materials emanate from Hope’s long-standing Centre for Culture and Disability Studies (CCDS).
The Centre is fundamentally concerned with social justice - challenging and changing the inequalities and prejudices that people who are disabled face on a daily basis.
It focuses particularly on how culture perpetuates and circulates such disability prejudices.
And to celebrate Disability History Month, the CCDS has shared a number of online seminars and research articles, as well as a major six-volume publication on the history of disability representation, giving anyone interested unique access to this wealth of information.
Professor David Bolt, Director of the Centre for Culture & Disability Studies, said: “The Centre for Culture and Disability Studies (CCDS) has been established at Hope for more than a decade, in which time it has engaged with disability in numerous interdisciplinary ways.
“Some of this work is being made freely available to mark Disability History Month, until 18 December.
“These international projects demonstrate the importance of interdisciplinarity, in particular the strengths of combining disability studies with cultural studies and history.”
As founding coordinator of the CCDS YouTube channel, Dr Owen Barden is promoting a special selection of six outstanding CCDS seminars that consider disability with particular reference to historical context.
You can access the seminars here.
The second way in which the CCDS is marking Disability History Month is via the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.
Editor-in-Chief Prof Bolt has asked the publisher, Liverpool University Press, to open the access to five research articles for the month.
The editor’s choice includes an article by Dr Barden and another that is part of a special issue on dwarfism guest edited by Hope’s Disability Studies lecturer Dr Erin Pritchard.
The third way in which the CCDS is marking Disability History Month is via A Cultural History of Disability, a six-volume project that explores representations from antiquity to the modern age.
General Editors Prof Bolt and Prof Robert McRuer (George Washington University) have asked the publisher, Bloomsbury, to open access to the whole set of books for the month.
Alongside the work of many international CCDS visitors, one of the volumes contains a chapter on the cultural history of Learning Disability by Dr Barden.
In addition, the digital resource, Bloomsbury Cultural History (BCH), includes Dr Ella Houston’s lesson plan, ‘Cultural Representations of Disability: Considering Lessons From the Past, and New Directions for the Future’.
You can access those volumes here.
** To learn more about Disability History Month: Hophttps://ukdhm.org/