The Negative/Contested/Dark Heritage of Disability Institutions

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Politics of Heritage Values: How Archaeologists Deal with Place, Social Memories, Identities, and Socioeconomics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

When I told a leading Massachusetts disability activist that I was starting an archaeological heritage research project on the state institutions for people with intellectual disabilities, he flinched. “But those are sites of trauma and oppression, nothing empowering like ‘heritage’!” he exclaimed. The three “schools,” all listed on the National Register of Historic Places, were indeed eugenicist institutions where terrible conditions and abuse catalyzed lawsuits that led to the closure of two and the shrinking of the third. The two closed campuses now belong to municipal governments, and the crumbling buildings are increasingly covered with weeds and graffiti as debates rage about what kind of redevelopment would be appropriate. Disabled activists seek to make the histories of institutionalization more widely known, understood, and memorialized, while town governments seek profitable uses of the land and buildings, and many nondisabled residents downplay the horrors of the institutions or even regret the closure of large employers in their communities. In this paper, I will test the applicability of “negative heritage,” “contested heritage,” “dark heritage,” and related theories to these cases, reflecting on the early stages of my project on disability history and heritage.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Politics of Heritage Values: How Archaeologists Deal with Place, Social Memories, Identities, and Socioeconomics

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37892.0