Accessing Archive presentation script

This project was about making archives more accessible for disabled, deaf and neurodivergent historians. 

The project was led by myself, Esme Cleall, and my colleague Rachel Bright, who unfortunately is not able to attend today. I work here in Sheffield and Rachel works at Keele. We are both historians of Britain and its empire and are both disabled. 

This presentation is going to take us through why we thought this would be a useful project to work on. What we did, some findings, and steps we might take in the future. 

What is an archive and are they important? 

Archives are collections of records and documents, related to the past. They can be digital or physical. They can be big or small. They might be ‘official archives’ owned by the government, such as The National Archives, which are based in Kew, or by local councils, such as Sheffield, or they might be owned by charities, institutions or private organisations. They may have very old materials, or they may be relatively recent. Most have textual records, but some might also have pictures, photographs, or more unusually examples of material culture.

Archives are important because they hold information. If we want to know what the past was like we could use secondary sources, such as books about the past, but in order to research areas that have not already been written about we need to consult primary documents. This is particularly the case if we’re researching historical people, events or phenomena outside of living memory. 

Being a historian often involves visiting an archive physically and, despite the growth of digital archives, such work continues to be imagined as the gold standard of historical research. This is because it’s only a minority of archive records that have been digitialised, and it’s very rare that you can take materials outside of the archive (unless you happen to own the deposit). Not all digital records are accessible, and there are several problems with major digital archive deposits and screen readers, for example, but our project manly focussed on physical archives. 

What is it like accessing an archive as a disabled person

Every disabled, deaf or neurodivergent person is different, just like every non-disabled person is different. And whilst we will get to commonalities shared between some disabled people later in the paper, we start with an individual example to bring out the particular ways in which people might access archives. This is an account of my own trip to an archive before this project started. In fact, just as I was putting in the application in December 2024, when I visited Sheffield City Archives, which are local to me. I was searching for some information about what it would have meant to have been a disabled child in early twentieth-century Britain. It was a cold, icy day, and my scoliosis and cardiovascular disorders made the journey slow and difficult. Although I had visited before, the archive still felt unfamiliar. I just about knew where to put my bag and coat, but had forgotten how to order the documents. 

Eventually, I started looking at the school records. Again, issues of disability made this hard for me. I can’t stand for long periods, but the tables were too high for me to be able to photograph the pages, which I needed for record keeping, from sitting down. Also, I’m dyslexic and the handwriting, though neat, was Edwardian in nature and reading was slow going!

There is something about examining records from these perspectives that I have talked to friends about as being akin to ‘crip time in the archives’. In this particular living of ‘crip time’, multiple factors converge to make such archival research challenging, and the single open reading room wasn’t a suitable venue for me to record my notes using speech-recognition software. 

Nonetheless, uneasy in my mind and body as I often am, I started leafing through old papers. And in these early twentieth-century Sheffield education reports, there were semi-anonymised summaries of young people who had attended schools for those labelled ‘mentally defective’, a label which we might, with some judicious caution, very roughly think about as akin to a learning disability, but ultimately much wider in application. ‘MW,’ a pregnant adolescent, was described in typical terms as being ‘fairly useful, but very slow’. She failed, it was noted, to understand that (I quote) ‘there is anything the matter with her’. Alongside MW were listed those who could ‘read and write but little’, the children of ‘drunkards’ and, in one case, a child claimed to take an unusual degree of interest in funerals. We also find reports of blind, deaf, epileptic, chronically malnourished and ‘fragile’ children and adolescents, all of whom were considered educational and social concerns. 

The limited information I had did a thing that historians of disability have discussed of  making disability hypervisible and making all the other aspects of them as living individuals invisible. These were people written about, not writing themselves. Sometimes I knew how old the children were. And sometimes, from the little information that was available, I could guess at the way in which class and gender intersected with disability to shape their lived experience as well as their representation. But there were so many gaps. What had happened to MW before she entered the records of the school, and what did she do afterwards, I could not find out. There are gaps in all archives. All sources must be read both along and against the archival grain. But sometimes issues of disability very starkly reflect the way in which a person might be reduced to their body or perceived disability. As many have noted, ‘far from neutral or benign repositories of knowledge, archives are politically structured and shaped by power relations that influence what is preserved and what is left.’  (footnote 1). What is less commonly acknowledged is the subtle and subjective ways in which we too respond to these documents in ways that are both emotional and embodied. 

I left the archive frustrated with the gaps, but also frustrated with myself due to the failures I perceived in my own archival skills. After the visit, I was overcome with fatigue, a flare in chronic pain, and the feeling of failure and doubt quickly set in. I am yet to do anything much with this research. 

Are all these disability issues? No, not strictly, but I accessed the archives as a disabled researcher of disability, and the way I read these documents was informed by that lived experience. Perhaps we need to be more open about the archival experience and our place as emotional and physical beings, alongside acknowledging the clear archival limitations when researching disability? Maybe we need to be more open about the process of research being messy, incomplete and disrupted, instead of only presenting a highly polished finished product. We might also try to think about the ways in which our embodied experiences of accessing documents might shape how we respond to them. 

What did our project do in response to this? 

In response, not just to this archive trip but in response to many archive trips that Rachel and I had taken over the last fifteen years, we put in for funding through this Wellcome Anti-Ableist Research Cultures scheme based at the university of Sheffield. We had several goals. 

Firstly, we created a network of for historians who self-identify as disabled, deaf, neurodivergent or chronically ill. We started the project in February 2025, and our network was open to UK-based PGRs, academic historians of all career stages, family historians and independent scholars. 

Secondly we sought the support of Buckingham Disability Service (BUDS), a disabled people’s organization, to help mentor us, and help think about what possibilities there are to advocate around questions of access.

Our project together evolved to not just be about network-building, but about us as disabled historians recognising our own ableist working habits. My own mind, during discussions, kept returning to recent critiques about ableism within Higher Education, the idealisation of us all as brains. Our bodies should be invisible and objectivity requires no emotions. For those of us with disabilities, this is virtually impossible. Angharad Butler-Rees has described how ‘sharing one’s everyday mental and emotional struggles is seen to risk presenting oneself as vulnerable, incapable or simply out of one’s depth’. ​(Footnote 2). Physical struggles are equally seen as weaknesses, not just by institutions, but by ourselves.

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We are keen then to acknowledge and address these often unspoken emotional, mental, and physical aspects of scholarly research, while also using our own privileged positions as permanent employees within universities to openly discuss our disabilities, something not everyone within our network feels able to do.

I am not going to list all of our findings so far, but clearly accessibility varied considerably. Perhaps it was because so many were neurodivergent but many were concerned about the lack of ‘sensory accessibility’ of this entire process. Other issues revolved around physical access and the significant time, preparation, and financial aspects of planning a visit, then the inevitable collapse post-trip. Or at least it felt inevitable to everyone, and this is part of what we want to interrogate today - is this how it has to be? 

It has been both comforting and disturbing how many stories involved crying unexpectedly in the archive, and feelings of shame, and embarrassment that came with that.

Whilst by no means all tears, or tears in the archive, are anything to do with mental health and/or disability the relationship between archival research and mental health is perhaps too diffuse to even attempt to pin down. Archival material can be distressing and/or triggering, the stress of being in an unfamiliar environment possibly away from home, might be unsettling, and the expectations of attempting to find or not finding material you expect can add additional pressure to our states of mind. 

While our initial focus was often on the nuts and bolts of the archive, travel, and planning, money became the overarching issue. As a History student stated in the 2025 History UK survey on disability and history, ‘Disability is expensive’. (Footnote 3). There were significant differences based on one’s status legally, in terms of employment or student status, as well as whether the archive was public or private, big or small.

Some funders, such as the British Academy, do offer extra funding for disabled award holders or to cover additional costs, be they additional equipment or support, arising due to issues of disability. Unusually, the British Academy even embeds this support in the application stage, helping disabled applicants who need support when putting in the application in the first place. There might also be some institutional workarounds - Esme secured extra money from the University of Sheffield to pay someone to proofread Colonising Disability, due to dyslexia.  

Yet, regardless of status, as a general rule, few researchers have access to additional funding because of their disability. 

Our favourite event was held in January, when we held a session with BuDs disability support charity last week (BuDs stands for Buckinghamshire Disability Support. During the session, we had access to their legal experts to discuss things around reasonable adjustments, Access to Work, how to know what adjustments we need and advocate for them. What is clear is that one’s status makes a big difference in terms of accessibility. 

Yet even those in full-time employment within universities noted problems accessing support, due to the strained financial situations across the sector. One clear piece of advice we received was that universities should not require disabled staff to conduct research for the same cost, or at the same speed, as able colleagues. That would be discrimination, the experts at BuDs, one an actual judge, confidentially told us. They have even given their time to provide some individual consultations for members about their issues getting support.

History is a rapidly diversifying discipline, and some excellent work can be conducted without physical archival work. However, many records are not digitised, were digitised in formats which are not always compatible with text-reading software (like some UK Parliamentary papers), or require physical inspection (I am thinking of some of the excellent work around material history, as well as Lara Putnam’s point about how important it is to understand the physical context of an archive).  

Given these issues, our Network participants seem to have responded to the challenges of archive access in three ways:

Masking is perhaps the most common solution our members have identified. This involved trying to perform as if ‘normal’, which meant having the same costs and doing as much research as we feel we must do. Expectations of how much work needed to be done and its cost were sometimes institution-imposed, but more often this reflected a worry about ‘falling behind’ a version of productivity we imagined non-disabled people would have. This might also involve not wanting to disclose disabilities to archive staff, and so missing some of the support that would be available.

At other times, masking was not possible. In those cases, participants (including ourselves) have felt a different dilemma: does this mean accepting that we may not be very productive, and does that mean we actually have to make a case to our HE institution and/or archive or funding body about why we cannot do things, and so need additional resources? We have to out ourselves, to basically say ‘I am not able’ and ask for help (difficult emotionally, especially when there is often a lack of clarity about who should help us, or if we are legally entitled to help). This can become its own administrative burden, being sent in circles with everyone wishing good things, but without the impetus to commit actual resources to solving any issues. This perpetuates our own ableism. It makes us feel small and emphasises our inabilities and posits us as financial burdens.

Change research. Both Rachel and I have done this We met during our PhDs, and we both spent considerable time earlier in our careers in South Africa conducting research.But doing this as disabled British-based people is difficult not least because of the travel concerned. We have therefore both increasingly focussed on Britain as a subject of research.  Even if I wished to try to return, my employer has let me know that it is unlikely that I would be Further, my thematic focus on disability in her academic work also reflects her lived experience as a disabled person, as well as her academic interests. 

How might we take things forward? 

Our primary goal here is to open a space for honest conversation about the challenges of accessing archives (and indeed the problems running networks!), in a bid to de-stigmatise them. We believe this is necessary in order to make those very first moves towards addressing them. 

We have begun to think about what would be tangible improvements for the future:

Firstly, we should make use of each other so we can learn what adjustments are considered ‘reasonable’ and are possible. It is all very well for external bodies, Access to Work, for example, to ask us what we need, but sometimes it is hard to know how our complex needs can be met in tangible ways. Newly disabled or diagnosed people may not be aware of what their needs are, let alone how to address them. Needs can also change over time. No one is an expert in all disabilities. Our needs may contradict; some may be more evident than others. Rachel and I hope to share ideas, and best practice, more widely not because the same adjustments will be useful to everyone (disability is a diverse category), but to generate new thinking, and help people think through what is possible for themselves. 

Secondly, we are aware that our work happens within an ‘ableist’ cultural climate, when some of the even insufficient social help disabled people are entitled to appears to be under threat: the proposed changes to PIP were alarming, Access to Work is being reviewed, and Reform have suggested that should they gain power they might repeal the Equalities Act altogether. Yet even with the status quo, better archival access for disabled researchers requires a wider cultural shift. . And disabled archive users may try to mask because we live in a world where we have experienced discrimination and hostility. By the time we get to archive spaces, we may be utterly shattered and bring with us a lifetime of ableist baggage. Creating a safe space for disclosure and dialogue is essential, and some of this will require money. That requires institutional (whether university or archive) prioritisation. We need institutions to prioritise this, have people responsible for doing this sort of work, who are suitably trained and resourced.

Lastly, our work at the moment is focussed on archive-users, but we have also been engaging with archives and libraries. We have been approached by some archives for advice when redesigning archival collections. While such conversations are welcome, of course they also take time, and pose complex questions about who represents disabled people in these contexts, and where the limits of our expertise lie. We plan over the coming months to put together some toolkits for both archivists and archive-users, to help build up confidence on both sides to have a more open conversation about needs. 

Final thoughts

Finally, we would give a bit of advice for other people doing this work, and that is to have a partner or two. We could not have done this project without each other.

For ourselves, we remain committed to making ourselves visible as disabled historians, but also want to build a system where people don’t have to be defined by their disability, and we recognise that the question of ’how much to make visible’ remains a tension.

Footnotes

(1)  Luke Beesley and Ella Clarke, ‘Stewarding Our Past, Adapting Our Present: the Disabled People’s Archive, Manchester’, ALISS, 18(2), 01/23, 10-13.

(2)  From Angharad Butler-Rees, ‘”There’s no place for emotions in academia”: experiences of the neoliberal academy as a disabled scholar’, in N. Brown, Lived Experiences of Ableism in Academia (2021). See also​ Katie Barclay, ‘Falling in love with the dead’, Rethinking History, 22/4 (2019), pp. 459–73​; Thomas A. Kohut, Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past (London, 2020).

(3) History student survey response, quoted in Sarah Holland, History UK Disability and History Report (2025), https://www.history-uk.ac.uk/projects/history-uk-disability-and-history-project  [last accessed 16 January 2026]