UKDHHH 2025 Connecting + Sharing Event

Following on from the success of our 2024 event at Manchester Deaf Centre, we are hosting a virtual event for organisations and individuals working with, or interested in, the histories of Disabled, Neurodivergent, and/or Deaf people!

The goal is to build networks amongst academic and independent researchers, museum and archive professionals and volunteers, creative practitioners, and activist communities.

We will be joined on Zoom by presenters from all over the world, and have scheduled presentations on wide-ranging aspects of Disabled, d/Deaf, and Neurodiverse histories.

Programme:

10:00 - 10:15: Welcome and Introduction


10:15 - 11:00: 15-Minute Presentations

Ann-Marie Foster - Archives, Access, and Disabled Historians.
Lillian Lawson - Scottish Deaf Archives – the challenges of sustaining a community archive.

11:00 - 11:15: Break

11:15 - 11:45: 5-Minute Presentations

Lirui Zhang - Disability Discourse and Representation in Museums: Models, Reflection, and Reinvention.
Philip Milnes-Smith - “This wide and universal theatre”?
Meredith Peruzzi - The Path to Deaf-Friendly Museums.
Kira McCarthy - Historical narratives of autism: Hidden voices and their stories.

11:45 - 12:30: Lunch Break

12:30 - 13:00: Panel

This presentation is a conversation between team members of two research projects:
‘Remembering Disability Institutions’ based in New South Wales Australia (Jack Kelly, Phillippa Carnemolla and Linda Steele)
‘My Home, My Rights’ based in Halifax, Canada (Conar Clory, Chantel Meister, Simon Snyder, Jenn Walters, Isai Estey and Sheila Wildeman)

13:00 - 13:15: Break

13:15 - 14:00: 5-Minute Presentations

Jasmine Sahu-Hough - Disability and the Dynamics of Healing in ancient Greece.
Niamh Malone - Mobilities, Materialities, and Heritage Construction: The Complexity of Movement for Disabled Individuals.
Anna Batzeli - Invisible Heroes: People with disabilities in WWII resistance.
Rebecca Brown - The experience of blind citizens in Belfast and Derry c. 1800-1978.
Katarina Kompauerova - Why Terms Matter: Language Shaping the Perception of Dwarfism.

14:00 - 14:15: Break

14:15 - 15:00: 15-Minute Presentations

Tilly Guthrie - Visual traces of touch: piecing together the epistolary lives of blind people through printed sources.
Isabelle Lawrence - Helen Keller, Eugenics and Museums: How can we navigate the internalised ableism of disabled historical figures in the histories that we construct?

15:00 - 15:15: Break

15:15 - 16:00: 15-Minute Presentations

Molly Joyce and Kristen Nassif - In Feeling: Empathy and Tension Through Disability.
Laura Cowley - ‘Laughing at Pity: a visual history of an offensive and ineffectual charity collection doll 1964-2025’.

16:00 - 16:10: Closing Remarks

The 2025 Connecting + Sharing event will be held on Zoom. We will work with you to ensure attending and presenting at the event is as accessible as possible.

There will be British Sign Language (BSL) interpretation by Lynne Bateman and Anne-Marie Marray along with Speech-to-Text captioning (STTR) by Marea O’Brien and Joanne Petre.

During the event, BSL interpreters will be pinned on Zoom.

STTR captioning will be available on Zoom, and also via a Streamtext captioning link.

If you have any concerns, requests, or information we should be aware of, please contact us at ukdishistheritagehub@gmail.com.

Funding for this event has been provided by two grants:

• Wellcome-funded New Networks in Critical Medical Humanities funding scheme, granted by the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research.
• Wellcome-funded Society for the Social History of Medicine Research Community Networks.

You can find out more on our website: https://ukdishisthub.mystrikingly.com/blog/funders