Disability History Project Overview
Collecting objects and interviews, 2024–2025
The experiences of people with disabilities have often been disregarded and marginalised in historiography, museums and historical collections. As a museum of contemporary history, the House of Austrian History wishes to make these neglected aspects of Austrian history more visible through a new focus on disability history in our collection practice.
Disability history engages with the history of people with disabilities. It also investigates social imaginaries of what was and is considered as disability at different times. Additionally, it explores the cultural, political and social meanings of disability. The Disability History Project at the House of Austrian History aims to contribute to making knowledge about this topic more accessible, to distribute it and to permanently preserve it for the future.
The House of Austrian History conducts this project together with the responsible ministry in Austria – the Federal Ministry of Social Affairs, Health, Care and Consumer Protection.
About the project
As part of this new project, the House of Austrian History collects objects about the experiences and the political engagement and activism of people with disabilities. With these objects, we would like to make visible how people fight to change conditions in their own lives as well as in society more broadly. These objects also convey what kind of possibilities exist for such fights as well as the challenges that people and groups face during their actions.
We conduct extensive oral history interviews to additionally document the perspectives of the people who have engaged with these objects. Our aim is to record these (hi)stories, to make them accessible and to permanently preserve them. This project particularly focuses on the history of the last decades until today so that we can speak to contemporaries and record their experiences about the collected objects in these interviews.
However, this is not a strict temporal restriction: The Disability History Project also collects older objects of contemporary history from the second half of the 19th century onwards, which capture important aspects of disability history as long as the agency and experiences of people with disabilities become tangible in these objects.
The collected objects and histories of the Disability History Projects will become a central part of future exhibitions and the educational programme of the House of Austrian History. Additionally, they will be included into the Austrian Federal Collections, which means that central and exemplary aspects of disability history in Austria will be permanently protected.
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