People with intellectual disabilities as actors in their history: Participatory practices of a Public Disability History

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Sebastian Barsch
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 447590969

Since its beginnings, disability history has been a field of activity for a small group of researchers who often had their own experiences with their own disability. In recent years, however, it has increasingly developed into a general subdiscipline of the historical sciences, not least because of the influence of social discourses on how disability is dealt with. Due to the importance that this phenomenon has acquired in the present, attention to the past is also growing. As the results of research on the history of people with disabilities find their way into the public domain through exhibitions, books, films and ultimately also material for history lessons, a disability history often becomes a public disability history. Public history can be understood as a participatory project in that underrepresented groups can be involved in the process of writing history. The project proposed here attempts to model a public disability history theoretically on the one hand, but also to accompany the practical application of this model empirically. The target group are people with a so-called mental disability. The starting point of the research project is a model of a public disability history that takes into account both the political demands of the disability rights movement resulting from a disability history as an emancipatory history and the epistemological challenges of such normative research (Barsch 2020, in press). On the basis of this model, a history workshop is to be conceived in which people with intellectual disabilities will design an exhibition on the history of human beings in accordance with the leitmotif of the disability rights movement "Nothing about us, without us". Methodologically, a participatory approach will be followed, in which the creation of exhibition texts in easy language is a central aspect. The activities of the history workshop are to be ethnographically accompanied. The texts of the exhibition will be examined with regard to their comprehensibility in a heterogeneous group. Research questions are:- What historical negotiation processes do people with intellectual disabilities carry out in reconstructing history with the help of language appropriate to the target audience?- Which historical processes of symbolism are stimulated by texts in light language among disabled and non-disabled recipients?

• DFG Programme: Research Grants