Crippling the Archives: Negotiating Notions of Disability in Appraisal and Arrangement and Description

Have archivists adequately documented people with disabilities? This essay examines how disability studies provide archivists with a framework with which to understand and document disability. After defining the medical and social models of disability, this article analyzes the development of the social model emphasizing the significance of social relationships and identity construction, and recognizes its weakness. As an alternative to the social model, this paper introduces the theory of complex embodiment and demonstrates how embodiment corresponds with archival theory, especially recent literature challenging the definition of provenance. The author concludes that embodiment can be applied to archival practice during appraisal and arrangement and description.