Slow, Uncomfortable and Badly Paid DisPLACE and the Benefits of Doing Disability History

DisPLACE is a digital platform for the collection and interpretation of experiences of disability, past and present, by people with disabilities in collaboration with other students, researchers, disability service organisations, and the creative industries. The project prototype was launched in 2019, and the site is intended to serve as the first archive in the Netherlands to gather and analyse a broad range of historical sources on disabilities together, the first shared virtual environment to utilise the cultural heritage of disability, and the first to make these accessible online to people with a wide variety of disabilities. The project is part of a larger initiative by the BIB Network (Bronnen voor Inclusieve Burgerschap), working to stimulate the collection and interpretation of disability history. In this essay, three of the coordinators of the project reflect on the challenges of funding, designing, and developing content for the website in a university course for public history students. In the spirit of this edited collection, the authors describe some of the uncomfortable truths made apparent by this project, as a means to critically reflect on the realities of doing undervalued work in an imperfect world.