About the Project
Welcome to Disability Inclusivity in Medicine: Representations, Policies, Environment, and Technology.
This exhibit explores the varied tracks through which disabled medical practitioners and topics of disability in medicine more broadly have emerged. The exhibit guides visitors to consider how these topics are increasingly being attended to and invested in from an increasing number of angles and range of stakeholders.
Yet even as disability representations of disabled doctors in media improves and the numbers of disabled healthcare professionals grows, genuine inclusiveness remains uneven and limited. Inclusiveness is a broad term, but here measures the degree of equity for and non-tokenistic representation of disability.
This is true across many domains of biomedicine in the United States: the built environment, popular media portrayals, medical education, news media narratives, bodies of knowledge, and the governing policies of medical institution and organizations.
While you may explore the many “rooms” (pages and collections of items) in this exhibit in any order, we suggest that you begin where disabled doctors enter public imagination: in movies, shows, books, and similar media. From there, you might explore the technologies—and the ideas about them shaped by news media reports—that allow disabled people to enter and practice medicine as physicians and other healthcare professionals. You will see that there are limitations and biases evident in the depictions of disabled physicians and the discourse about the technological devices they use. Disability and the use of particular devices is portrayed as conferring a lesser and special status rather than discussed as bringing diversity and valuable insight to medicine. Popular narrative media representations, which might add dimensionality to conceptions of disability, are similarly limited in scope and imagination.
How then might this shift?
We suggest that you next explore the advocacy work by disabled medical students, disabled doctors ,and their allies. This activism takes place across social and digital media, in the physical world, and through academic scholarship. These contributions have made import impacts in workplace culture, disability education, and institutional policies regarding medical professionals and students with disabilities. And yet, their progress is slow.
Finally, this exhibit invites you to imagine a more inclusive environment – one that holds space for a complex, three dimensional disability. To guide this envisioning—which disability studies scholars of crip futurity like Alison Kafer show concretely affects the present—we are guided by the (also) somewhat aspirational concept of Universal Design. Universal Design which aspires to blanket accessibility has long been a staple of work and though by disabled people; architects, educators, and others have found ways to operationalize Universal Design principles. The curb cut is a popular and illustrative example. Curb cuts allows wheelchair users, people with strollers, those pulling suitcases, and now pedestrians overly focused on their mobile phones to avoid navigate around the barrier and danger that curbs present.
Join us to think about the past, present, and future of disability inclusivity in medicine!