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Forum du mardi : recherches en cours Werkstattberichte
INVITATION
Patrick Schmidt
(Universität Gießen)Disability and Disabled Persons in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Century Periodicals. Some Observations on Similarities and Dissimilarities between British, French and German Discourses
Mardi 8 février 2011, à 18 h, à l’Institut historique allemand
Although the term »disability« usually refers to some observable psychological or physical peculiarity, it is rightly understood in contemporary disability studies as a category that is discursively constructed in many important aspects. The research project that will be presented in this talk therefore aims at a reconstruction of discourses about disabilities and disabled persons during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As public debates weren’t structured yet by umbrella terms like »disability« , »handicap« or »Behinderung«, the historian has to take a closer look on discoursive fields as diverse as »freak shows« and »poverty and poor relief«
in order to reconstruct perceptions and attitudes towards disabled persons. While some arguments and narratives do appear regularly in periodicals in all three countries under consideration, others seem to be rather specific to one of them.
This may point to important differences in attitudes related to differing political, socio-economic and cultural contexts, but the talk will also address the difficulties in establishing such causal relationships with certainty.
