The lives behind the labels and the institutions.
Disability history is not small. It is not niche. It is not a medical side note.
Disabled people have shaped culture, politics, family life, labor movements, art, science, and survival itself for all of human history.
The reason this history is hard to find is because it was actively removed. Silenced. Muted. Cast out. Buried in institutions. Filed under “unfortunate” and left out of the story of what it means to be human.
This page brings those stories back into view.
To engage with this history is to see how disability has been shaped by both oppression and resistance, confinement and community, abandonment and autonomy, restriction and invention, exploitation and solidarity.
Look Back. Push Forward.
Doctors, Data, and Death: The Making of Aktion T4
“Hereditary illness! An interesting exhibition for educating the public about producing genetically healthy offspring has…
“One of the biggest things that’s so toxic about ableism and capitalism is this idea that our worth is based on our productivity. We are interdependent. We know there’s more to our worth than just whether we’re taxpayers or whether we can work forty or more hours a week”
― Alice Wong, Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life