CAFe Speaker Series: “Reimagining Archives around Disabled Desires: Past Experiences toward Future Possibilities”
Date/Time: Wednesday, September 17, 2025 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Location: Virtual
UMD students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends—join us for the CAFe Speaker Series. (Registration Required)
A CAFe-MIDA Joint Event! Visit MIDA for more information.
Abstract: Archives in the present moment impact disabled people in a number of ways: through historic records that document disabled people in ways that can deny their subjectivity and agency—including asylum documentation, criminal records, and medical files—and outright absence from other types of records, disabled people can feel erased in history. Alternatively, community-based archives have been shown to offset historical imbalances through historically marginalized or minoritized communities representing themselves.
Against a backdrop of a plethora of archival records on disability that deny our subjectivity and agency, this talk addresses preliminary findings from a new project by the Disability Archives Lab that focuses on the ways that disabled people imagine archives differently. This project, conducted by, with, and for disabled people, uses data collected through focus groups with disabled archival users to identify their current issues in archives as well as how they desire facets of archives to be different. Centering the powerful words of disabled people, this research not only aims to understand the needs and desires of disabled people who have worked with archival materials but also demonstrates the critical role of disabled people in building and designing the scaffolding for a new disability digital community archive.
Bio: Gracen Brilmyer (they/them/iel) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Studies at McGill University and the director of the Disability Archives Lab, which hosts multi-disciplinary projects that center the politics of disability and archives as well as how to imagine archival futures that are centered around disabled desires (DisabilityArchivesLab.com). Their research asks questions around power, representation, erasure, and impacts of/in archives for disabled people—both users and workers. Their work has been published in journals such as Archival Science, Archivaria, and The Journal of Feminist Scholarship, and they co-edited a new book, Preserving Disability: Disability & the Archival Profession (Litwin Books) with Dr. Lydia Tang.
Speaker(s): Gracen Brilmyer (they/them/iel), Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies, McGill University ; Director of the Disability Archives Lab