Re-Presenting Disability – the challenge facing our museums

Academics from the University of Leicester have compiled the first ever comprehensive analysis and exploration of disability-related narratives in museums and galleries.

With 28 contributors from across the globe included in the volume, Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum examines the topic of disability within museum collections and exhibitions for the first time. Contributors range from academics to activists, offering a diverse range of perspectives on disability culture.

Re-Presenting Disability asks what potential museums might hold to change the way society perceives and understands disability and explores how the marked absence and invisibility of disabled people in museum and gallery exhibitions and interpretation can be overcome. The book marks an important step in displacing the often negative and discriminatory depictions of disability found in cultural and media settings.

The collection is edited by Dr Richard Sandell and Jocelyn Dodd from the University of Leicester’s School of Museum Studies, and Professor Rosemarie Garland-Thomson  from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Jocelyn Dodd, who is also the Director of Research Centre for Museums and Galleries in the School of Museum Studies, commented:

“We wanted not only to explore the potential for museums and other cultural institutions to shift public perceptions of disability but to stimulate further experimentation and practice in this important field in museums and galleries worldwide.”

For more details of the book click here,

Richard Sandell is Head of the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. He is the editor of Museums, Society, Inequality (2002), author of Museums, Prejudice and the Reframing of Difference (2007) and co-editor (with Robert R. Janes) of Museum Management and Marketing (2008), all published by Routledge.

Jocelyn Dodd is Director of the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG) in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research interests focus on the social role and agency of museums, museums and galleries as learning environments and, in particular, the impact museum experiences have on visitors and project participants.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Professor of Women's Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Her fields of study are feminist theory, American literature, and disability studies. Her publications include Staring: How We Look (2009) and Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture (1997).