Accessibility and Archives: Do you include Disability when you imagine Diversity?

Ahead of Disability History Month this year (and its theme of Disability Livelihood and Employment), Philip Milnes-Smith reflects on the Accessibility Working Group’s ‘Careers Game’ workshop shared at the 2024 ARA Conference in Birmingham. 

It is sometimes said that “You can’t be what you can’t see.”  Inspired by Ren Leming’s recent LinkedIn posts, I experimented for the first time with ChatGPT and it generated the following basic visual description of a diverse boardroom in Dublin:

Imagine a modern, spacious room with large windows showcasing a view of Dublin’s skyline. The boardroom table is surrounded by individuals of various ethnicities and genders, engaged in a lively discussion.

You might see a woman of Asian descent presenting a proposal, while a Black man takes notes. An older Caucasian woman contributes her insights, and a young Hispanic man shares his ideas. The decor includes elements that reflect Dublin’s culture, like artwork featuring local landmarks.

As artificial intelligence has been trained on real-world models, it should prompt us to reflect on contemporary attitudes.  I expect that you too, if imagining a diverse boardroom in your place of work, might be picturing a better gender balance than probably exists, and also, perhaps, a wider range of ethnicities.  However, I somewhat doubt that you were picturing people with disabilities – and not because I think you are particularly prejudiced.  Disabilities can look very different from each other, making it harder to visualise than other identities – and of course, some of the people you pictured could have a non-visible disability,  However, even regular blog readers, introduced to the likes of Francis Joseph Campbell and Thomas Rhodes Armitage, Lady Victoria Campbell and Elizabeth Gilbert are likely to find it hard to sidestep the powerful social conditioning that makes people equate disability with passivity and incapacity rather than dynamic leadership. 

Disabled people don’t consistently figure in the positive, aspirational diversity paradigm.  Lennard J Davies[i] has posited that a diversity that imagines we are really all the same disguises from us the implied existence of an outgroup whose difference is so marked that they can negatively be characterised as ‘not like us’.  Given the reality that disability is part of many human lifetimes, it is bracing to reflect that we might be among those deemed “the abject, the abnormal, and the extremely marginal” (whom nobody would dream could be in our boardrooms). 

It is all too easy to think of disabled people as one-dimensional beings – whose disabled identity is the only one that counts.  Importantly, therefore, in devising the Careers Game workshop for this August’s ARA Conference the eight disabled avatars we created to play the game included, for example, someone of Irish traveller heritage, a care-experienced person, an Arabic speaker, a carer, a single parent, and a non-binary individual.  These equally qualified candidates encountered a range of obstacles at different stages of the recruitment process that had a differential impact on them due to the intersection of their distinct disabilities and other aspects of their identity. 

The point of the workshop was awareness raising – although most will be familiar with the issues temporary contracts raise for most new professionals, the additional barriers and impacts faced by certain disabled applicants may not be obvious, and therefore may never have been considered. For everyone, this game is high stakes, but its inconsistent rules are not fully revealed to disabled players.  Even the most successful of our avatars ended up unable to take up the role for which they had accepted a job offer due to changed organisational circumstances. 

Having recently attended the ICA-SUV conference in Glasgow (entitled ‘What does Diversity mean to you?’), I want to be very clear that my title for this blog is not intended as negative feedback for that event.  Indeed, it was clear that within our profession, worldwide, there has been a recognition that important conversations need to take place: about the disabled people in our records (and how we describe and surface them to ensure discoverability through catalogues and other finding aids); and about how we ensure our services become more accessible (to users and future volunteers and staff).  Disabled people should not be expected to undertake this work (and bear the burden of additional emotional labour) single-handed (or at all if they don’t want to). 

Although disabilities can be acquired, most senior sector leaders with disabilities will have had to grow from entry level workers with disabilities.  However, if the filtering processes of recruitment leave too many disabled people unable to pursue their chosen career, not only will their valuable lived experience and skills be lost to the profession, but the pool of senior disabled professionals will remain (disproportionately) small.  Perhaps you won’t be able to see what we couldn’t be.

Thanks to Iida Saarinen, Eyizera Farrow and Phoebe Brunt for co-developing the Careers Game session.

Guest blogs are welcome.  Please email diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk.  We would also like to hear from you if you have found one of the Allies’ blogs helpful to your work.

[i] Davis, Lennard J. “Diversity.” Keywords for Disability Studies, edited by Rachel Adams et al., NYU Press, 2015, pp. 61–64. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15nmhws.22.