ALISS Disability History Month showcase 

November 28th 2024

Speakers

 Legless in London – Dr Ryan Sweet and Focus Games
view the slides

Experience life as a lower-limb amputee in Victorian London! Achieve your goals as you navigate the streets, negotiate the job market, find love, buy property, and use artificial legs. Legless in London is a role-and-move strategy board game inspired by Ryan Sweet’s 2022 book Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. During this talk, Ryan and the Focus Games team  discussed how the game came to fruition thanks to funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. They explained the game’s mechanics, accessibility features, and next steps.

Talking about difficult histories at Bethlem Museum of the Mind – David Luck, Archivist
View the slides

David Luck, archivist at the Museum,  looked at the history of Bethlem Royal Hospital, the oldest psychiatric hospital in the UK, and how the Museum tries to display and explain it’s diverse past. David talked about some of the lessons the Museum has learnt over time and how it hopes to apply these to its future programme of exhibitions and projects.’

Mentally Healthy Tayside: Using Archive Collections to Support Wellbeing. Caroline Brown, University of Dundee

View the slides

Archive Services at the University of Dundee is the custodian of the records of NHS Tayside and responsible for preserving records relating to hospitals and former asylums in Dundee, Perth and Angus. Caroline discussed how these collections are used by a wide range of researchers and communities. She focused in particular on projects where the Archives have worked with people who have learning difficulties or mental health issues. These projects have explored historic care and treatment with a view to reflecting on today’s attitudes and improving wellbeing.

Change Minds – Gary Tuson, County Archivist, Norfolk Record Office

Change Minds is a programme using archives and creativity to improve the wellbeing of people with mental health issues.   Initially developed in Norfolk by a partnership between the Norfolk Record Office and the Restoration Trust, it has recently set up a Change Minds Hub to support the development and delivery of Change Minds projects across the UK and is currently working towards a national roll out.

Heather Dawson
Aliss secretary
h.dawson@lse.ac.uk