REPAIR is delighted to announce the launch of our website, Putting Disability History on the Map, a project dedicated to making place-based disability histories publicly accessible. The website is intended to spark interest in preserving and interpreting the disability histories all around us.
The project was supported by the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Telling the Full History Preservation Funds and the University of Minnesota’s Imagine Fund Grant Program.
The website is designed to be highly accessible to people with disabilities. To the best of our abilities, we have met WCAG 2.1 accessibility guidelines. The material posted on this site is open-source. We are making this available to the public under an Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license.
REPAIR’s case studies offer deep dives into particular sites, using Esri’s StoryMaps to provide context to place through the lens of disability history. Case studies use a variety of historical primary sources – photographs, maps, newspaper clippings, music, film footage, and more – to tell these stories.
REPAIR strives towards an intersectional approach to site interpretation. Featured places in the project include the Minnesota State Fairgrounds and the fair’s relationship
to the Minnesota Eugenics Society; Lafayette Square in Washington D.C. and its role as a place of mobilization in support of the 1977 Section 504 Sit-Ins; the Shakopee State Reformatory for Women and queer inmates who resisted incarceration throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s; and the Milwaukee Ordnance Plant, where Deaf women war workers produced munitions during World War II.
REPAIR’s project currently features more than twenty sites, with case studies written by REPAIR co-founders, cross-institutional collaborators, and students in REPAIR’s 2021 public history course. The website includes resources for teaching and learning about preserving disability histories at the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as instructions on how to develop future case studies.
For more information, please contact us at repairdisheritage@gmail.com.