Disability and the Inclusive Intention

For many years, museum education practice has been guided by the watchword inclusion – an ideal for public service and professional practice rooted in more than a century of work to expand museum audiences. Most museum educators would likely say that they embrace the intention to be inclusive practitioners, a commitment fostered by the likes of the Inclusive Museum Research Network (founded 2008), The Incluseum (founded 2012), MASS Action (launched 2016), and many other professional associations, grassroots groups, institutional initiatives, and individual leaders. But throughout this phase of our profession’s development, there’s been an odd parallax – our work toward inclusion has often remained separate from, or has completely overlooked, disability as a dimension of identity. Instead, the tendency has been to view inclusion for people with disabilities as a need for “access,” a concept that leads us into a focus on physical affordances, legal compliance, or accommodation, rather than a fundamental mindset of allyship with people with disabilities as active (or potential) museum users, learners, and workers. This dichotomy is rooted in part in the progression through which disability consciousness initially permeated museums. As the authors relate, when disability awareness first began to arise in museum institutions, it was through a rights-based framework – a response to the demands and standards of new legislation in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA). These entry points brought with them a legalistic focus on the built or designed environment, demands for workplace and public accommodation, and actionable standards for statutory compliance. These origins laid a path in which disability access escaped wider affirmation as an element of inclusive practice, instead reducing them to a checklist of accommodations to follow, or as Eisenhauer Richardson calls it here in “Museum Education for Disability Justice and Liberatory Access,” an “etiquette course” in appropriate language and pedagogy. This mechanistic and legalistic approach has sometimes led to a certain anxiety amongst museum practitioners, reflected in commonly heard questions: What should we be doing to make our museum accessible? What are we required to do? Have we done enough? Is it possible to do everything? In many cases, our field’s guiding resources and professional literature have not yet supported a shift away from the deficit-based framing that positions disability as a problem to be solved. The manual of practice Museum Administration 2.0, for example, houses its primary discussion of disability in the chapter titled “Legal Issues.” The American Alliance of Museums’ page on Accessibility takes a “fix-it” approach as well, listing how-to articles about accommodation technologies and program formats. Individual museums often make one or two major moves