Timelines

Timelines of disability rights history

Timelines are a visual way of organizing and transmitting certain historical event that shows their location in, and the passage of, time. They usually are focused on one aspect of history or one historical event. They unpack how that event or apsect of history happened through time. For example, the Canadian Policy Alliance’s timeline is of policies affecting disabled Canadians.

Often disability history is considered to be an aspect of other histories that warrants a timeline. Disabled people have mostly been either omitted from much of mainstream histories. At times, we are present, but mis-represented, or represented in an oblique way, for example, we appear in the history of medicine, or the history of technology, but as problems in need of being fixed, or the starting point for what is really important and needs to be recorded in those histories.

When constructing timelines of nation-building, or of social justice movements, most often anything related to disability is simply not included.

Historiography, that is the writing of history in certain ways but not others, seems to me to be very important in writing disability history. As people who often disappear to the writing of history, what we choose as an event worthy of being recorded, and which we don’t, is a crucial question.

The question of history, is also an important one to fans, as online interactions, even though they are written and often archived, do not always translate into something that is remembered as part of fan history, within the communities in which they happen.

In this section I will include timelines of disability histories. The goal is to reflect on what timelines are and do and leave behind, in order to build timelines of disability online.