Disability History Month – What You Need To Know
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With so many month-long awareness campaigns throughout the year, it can often become easy to simply ignore all that is going on in the world. Yet one equality campaign aims to bring light to a marginalised group often left behind, both figuratively and literally, in intersectional activism discourses.
UK Disability History Month (UKDHM) is an annual awareness event which runs from November 22nd to December 22nd, with 2017 marking the campaign’s 8th year. The goal of the month is to create a platform for people with disabilities to discuss their historic struggle for equality and human rights, as well as tackling modern-day ableism and accessibility issues that affect their daily lives. The charity organisation also aims to discuss disability from an intersectional perspective, prioritising the stories of disabled women, people of colour, and LGBTQ+ individuals.
The unconventional start and end dates of the event ensures that it does not overlap into the Christmas period, giving students equal opportunity to run events at their schools and colleges, as well as covering other key related awareness events such as HIV/AIDS Day, International Day of People with Disabilities, and International Human Rights Day (held on the 1st, 3rd, and 10th December respectively).
The theme for this year’s campaign is Disability and Art, examining the works of disabled artists and how the changing attitudes towards disabled people throughout history are reflected through their portrayal in art. The charity is encouraging the likes of museums, libraries, councils, and educational facilities to host exhibitions events surrounding these topics and to engage the wider public in listening to disabled peoples’ own experiences.
The campaign has already enlisted 11 independent artists with disabilities to produce teaching content for their online videos in partnership with the National Disability Arts Collection and Archive, educating viewers about topics such as the ‘social model’ of disability, disability representation in artist portraits, and how arts and activism are interlinked.
Notable disabled artists that the charity have created profiles for in their resources page include the likes of Claude Monet (visually impaired), Frida Kahlo (spina bifida), and Vincent van Gogh (mental illness).
The official national launch of Disability History Month will be held at Parliament on the evening of Wednesday 22nd November 2017, by invitation only. The campaign has already seen a successful all-day Disability in Art conference and workshop on 21st October in London, with representatives attending from all across the country.
With the recent controversial governmental cuts to Personal Independent Payment and Disabled Students Allowance, here’s hoping this year’s Disability History Month has a bigger impact than ever before.
If you’d like to keep up to date with everything the campaign is up to, you can follow them on Facebook or Twitter.