Apparitional representations: disability history, reparative descriptions, and ethical failings in a special research collection

Abstract

Reparative description is a trend in archival scholarship that seeks to address past harms caused by archives that misrepresented and silenced historically marginalized communities in their collections. Identifying and better representing disability history in archives is a part of this trend with many archivists publishing either theoretical approaches or reparative description work that focus mostly on the end product. Few published works, whether a blog post or academic article, consider the challenges and potential failures of remediating descriptions in archives that do not have collections focused on disability history. For archives, such as the Western History Collections, disability history is a miniscule part of its collections, adding to the already difficult process of remediating descriptions. In this thesis, I outline my process for remediating descriptions using a variety of theories from archival, trauma, feminist, and disability studies in order to illustrate the professional and ethical challenges of crafting adequate descriptions that better represent the disabled subject in the Western History Collections. Using ghosts and haunting as a foundation for approaching reparative description work at a special collection that never focused on disability history, I consider the realities of bringing historically marginalized disabled persons to the forefront of archival descriptions while highlighting the importance of making the invisible work of remediation in archives visible.