Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editors’ Foreword
- 1 Community Archives and the Creation of Living Knowledge
- 2 Disorderly Conduct: the Community in the Archive
- Part I Storytelling, Co-Curation and Community Archives
- Part II Citizens, Archives and the Institution
- Part III Disruptive and Counter Voices: the Community Turn
- Index
16 - The Public and the Relational: the Collaborative Practices of the Inclusive Archive of Learning Disability History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editors’ Foreword
- 1 Community Archives and the Creation of Living Knowledge
- 2 Disorderly Conduct: the Community in the Archive
- Part I Storytelling, Co-Curation and Community Archives
- Part II Citizens, Archives and the Institution
- Part III Disruptive and Counter Voices: the Community Turn
- Index
Summary
Q: Why is it important that people with learning disabilities tell their stories?
A: I think it's to let other people know what's happened to them and make it aware of people so that it doesn't happen. People doesn't go around hurting other people, it's not fair. So I think if they write their story it makes people aware, because years ago it wasn't aware of people with learning disability because they were put away. So now it's time for people with learning disability to write their story and to let other people know. (Cooper, 2008)
Mabel Cooper, former resident St Lawrence's Hospital, self-advocate, broadcaster and founder member of the Open University's Social History of Learning Disability Group.
This book's title – Communities, Archives and New Collaborative Practices – raises the question of who or what is collaborating. The reading of the title most immediately available might be that the collaboration is between communities and those that work in archives. Yet we want to focus on another type of collaboration here, one that is equally crucial in developing new collaborative practices for archives. In a recent action research project to develop an Inclusive Archive of Learning Disability History, it became clear that in seeking to produce an archive we needed to conceive of collaboration not only in terms of people but also in terms of a collaboration between different political theories. In developing the Inclusive Archive, we recognised that we needed to seek a collaborative relationship between the political ideas derived from public political logics – public service, public sphere, ‘on behalf of the public’ and for posterity – and those that derive from relational and personal-centred politics. While there was constant debate in the team with some of us favouring one set of political logic and some the other, we realised that for an archive to be an archive, and for it to be an inclusive one, we needed to develop an approach to archival practice that held both the public and the relational political traditions in dialogue.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Communities, Archives and New Collaborative Practices , pp. 219 - 234Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2020