Interpreting Disability: Museums, Heritage and the Politics of Knowledge

Museums have made considerable progress in improving physical, sensory and intellectual access, enabling more disabled people to enter museum spaces and engage with collections, exhibitions and programs. However, access is only one part of the story. Once inside, do disabled visitors find their histories, experiences and contributions represented, and how are these stories told? Museums are part of a wider cultural environment, alongside film, television and literature, that shapes the meanings attached to disability in society. Through the ways they represent and interpret disability-related people, objects and histories, museums can reinforce existing assumptions and stereotypes, or they can question them and offer different ways of understanding disability. Therefore, who decides what is represented, which words are used, and how disability is interpreted matters not only for disabled people, but for everyone whose understanding of disability may be shaped by what museums choose to represent and how they interpret it.Museums and heritage institutions have increasingly brought disability histories into exhibitions and public programs, yet greater visibility does not automatically produce more nuanced public understanding. Depending on how these histories are selected, framed and interpreted, museums may reproduce reductive or stereotypical representations, or they may open new ways of understanding disability across time and cultures. An important gap remains in understanding whose knowledge and perspectives shape these interpretations, and how disability history, cultural context and lived experience are brought into dialogue with museum and heritage practice.Recent developments, including collaborative and co-creative work with disabled people and communities, and the growing influence of Disability Studies on curatorial and educational practice, offer new approaches for addressing this gap. This Research Topic aims to bring these developments into critical dialogue, examining how disability is interpreted, whose knowledge informs that interpretation, and what audiences and practitioners learn through the process, with a view to supporting museum and heritage practice that is historically informed, collaborative, and more willing to critically examine its own decisions and effects.At the intersection of cultural and historical understandings of disability, interpretation, participation and learning, this Research Topic asks: How do museums and heritage institutions shape public understandings of disability through interpretation and learning?We invite research and practice-based contributions examining how disability is interpreted, whose knowledge shapes interpretation, and what audiences and practitioners learn through these processes across diverse cultural, geographical and historical contexts. Historical, ancient and pre-modern case studies are particularly encouraged alongside contemporary museum and heritage practice.Contributions are invited on:• Exhibitions, collections and interpretive interventions that identify, represent or reinterpret disability histories, including from ancient and pre-modern contexts;• Participatory and co-creative approaches involving disabled people and communities, drawing on their lived experience and expertise;• Museum and heritage education programs and pedagogical approaches engaging audiences with disability histories and contemporary experience;• Language, terminology and models of disability, and how these shape interpretation and communication;• Visitor learning and responses, including how interpretation may reinforce, negotiate, challenge or reshape understandings of disability;• Disability-informed professional development and resulting change in curatorial, educational or institutional practice.We especially encourage contributions that move beyond description of an exhibition, program or intervention to critically examine the interpretive and educational choices involved, whose knowledge shaped them, what understandings of disability were communicated, and what was learned from the process and its outcomes. Topic editors: Nevine Nizar Zakaria, Alexandra F Morris, Wade Berger, Debby Sneed, Charalampos Chaitas Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86899/interpreting-disability-museums-heritage-and-the-politics-of-knowledge