Cripping the Archive
Disability, History, and Power
Cutting-edge methods for unearthing disability history
Cloth – $125
978-0-252-04669-8
Paper – $30
978-0-252-08879-7
eBook – $19.95
978-0-252-04803-6
Publication Date
Paperback: 08/05/2025
Cloth: 08/05/2025
Cloth: 08/05/2025
About the Book
How do we explain the conspicuous absence of disability from the histories we write? What forces and factors create this dynamic? How can disability be everywhere and nowhere, present and absent, and obvious and overlooked in both the historical record and historians’ interpretations of the past?Jenifer L. Barclay and Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy edit a collection of interdisciplinary essays that consider how and why physical, sensory, intellectual, and psychological disabilities are underrepresented, erased, or distorted in the historical record. The contributors draw on the methodology and practice of cripping to uncover disability in contested archives and explore ways to build inclusive archives accountable to, and centered on, disabled people and disability justice. Throughout, they show ableness informing the politics of the archive as a physical space, a discriminatory record, and a collection of silences.
An essential contribution to research methods and disability justice, Cripping the Archive offers a blueprint for intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches that bridge disability studies, history, and archival studies.
About the Author
Jenifer L. Barclay is an associate professor of history at the University of Buffalo. She is the author of The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America. Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy is an associate professor of history at the University of New Brunswick. She is the author of Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean.Reviews
“Cripping the Archive provides a cornucopia of diverse, provocative, astounding and often lesser-known case studies that showcase how centering disability in historical research, even in its obfuscation, minoritization, or absence, can be revelatory and productive.”—Liat Ben-Moshe, author of Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition
“A highly impressive and thought-provoking volume. The diversity of essays reflects the multiple connections between disability and the archive. Taken together, and with its powerful introduction, the book will significantly influence not only the content of future research but also how that research is conducted.”
—Esme Cleall, author of Colonising Disability: Impairment and Otherness Across Britain and Its Empire, c. 1800–1914
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