UCLA

This critical archival studies dissertation examines the subtleties of disability in records by broadly asking “how can we tell a history of disability with little to no forms of archival evidence?” I attempt to answer this question by interrogating the contents of historical documentation, the archival processes that influence their understanding as well as disabled people’s experiences in archives today. This project begins with the disabled community: through interviews with disabled scholars, artists, activists and community members, it first draws out the effects and affects of archival representation and archival spaces on the disabled community today. Then, in response to the disabled community’s need for more complex representation, it closely examines a history where disability has been obscured or erased: The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. To do this, historical records, processes, and documentation are closely analyzed in order to excavate narratives of disability within the history of The Field Museum and demonstrate how a history of disability can be told even through its absence. This dissertation develops the theoretical scaffolding of a crip provenance: a disability-centered framework that resists the desire to restore a ‘complete’ fonds and instead meets records where they are at in order to acknowledge all of the new connections and relations that are created because records are always already dispersed, duplicated, and partial. Drawing attention to how many archivists work to reconcile with records that have been moved, rearranged, and dispersed, to reconstruct a fonds, this framework highlights the ‘curative’ and ‘rehabilitative’ orientations of provenance—the emphasis of the origin, history and custody of a record or fonds. Put in conversation with disability studies scholarship—which critiques rehabilitating, curing, and restoring—the concept of provenance can be radically refigured, placing less emphasis on ‘fixing’ or reconstructing a fonds (which might have never been in the first place), and instead addressing the reality of archival material to acknowledge the new relationships created because they are always already fragmented. Acknowledging archival realties with specific attention to the people, systems, materials, and spaces that are in relation to disability and archives, a crip provenance places focus on the new relationships and proximities that are established because they are always already dispersed, duplicated, and incomplete, which can facilitate in an expansive re-reading of archival absences, partialities, and experiences of disability.