FROM THE PRESIDENT-PROVOCATEUR: THE REFERENDUM….DHA & THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION….LATEST TALES OF THE DISABILITY HISTORY CHAIR
1. The Referendum
As you will soon learn, if you don’t know already, the DHA is in the process of filing for nonprofit status in the state of California. Many will wonder why this is necessary, especially since at present the comely DHA must surely fly under the IRS radar with our modest budget of less than the cost of one power chair or several hundred white canes or one hundred copies of my second book (hardcover). Once we have 501c3 nonprofit status, we will be able to launch a modest fundraising campaign that will allow us to offer article and book prizes, start a scholarly journal specifically devoted to disability history, and eventually provide support for fellowships and archival preservation. All of these things will bring greater visibility to the field and the DHA members currently working in it.
Thanks to the help of a class on nonprofit corporations at the UC Davis Law School and careful study of NOLO Press’s The California Nonprofit Incorporation Kit, the Board of Directors has determined that before we can file for nonprofit status, it makes the most sense for us to change to a “nonstatutory member” organization. Currently we operate as a “statutory” one which is the default. Under this structure members participate much more than they do in a nonstatutory one, voting not just for directors but also for a host of other financial, organizational, and logistical issues large and small. When our legal advisors (who aren't official advisors) first suggested this, I was of course scandalized, believing it a crime against democratic principles to in effect be asking our members to vote to abolish their membership. But when they explained it and I read through the NOLO Press book and dissected the recent move by our local public radio station to do this very thing, the reasons made sense. Under the nonstatutory structure members join for reasons other than making decisions about budget, bylaws, officers, etc but rather to support what the organization does on behalf of – in this case – our scholarly and professional interests. As will hopefully become clear from reading this newsletter, the DHA is making inroads in a number of areas. And of course anyone wishing to get more involved may do so by serving on committees, contributing to the newsletter, or by helping publicize our organization at the various conferences we attend both nationally and internationally.
Please, even if you never vote out of principle or spite or a diagnosable inclination to procrastinate, VOTE THIS ONCE! If we don’t get a quorum by the deadline, all our efforts of the past year will have been for nothing.
2. DHA & the American Historical Association
In the November 2006 DHA Newsletter I reported on working with President Linda Kerber (University of Iowa) to make people with disabilities and disability issues more prominent for the American Historical Association. Our first piece of good news was adding “disability” to the list of scholarly interests one can check when joining. Three months later, DHA members Doug Baynton (University of Iowa), Paul Longmore (San Francisco State University), and yours truly (University of California, Davis) had articles in the November 2006 Perspectives in a forum on disability and the AHA introduced by Kerber. If you missed it or forgot, here’s the link: http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2006/0611/
We followed up these efforts at the annual convention in Atlanta. Thanks to the DHA, the changes could already be seen in the Conference Program and other mailings. Gone was the awkward, patronizing, euphemistic language of “persons requiring special needs.”
Most significantly for the future, we met in a 90-minute session with the Professional Division, whose duty is – according to the AHA website – “to collect and disseminate information about employment opportunities and to help ensure equal opportunities for all historians, regardless of individual membership in the Association.” Put another way, this is a major AHA committee that has the power to present disability as a form of diversity in hiring, retention, and promotion to universities and colleges across the United States. It can establish a climate where history departments would be more welcoming of colleagues with disabilities and can create a set of guidelines similar to those currently applied to other underrepresented groups. Moreover, it can help departments see the important links between disability history as a field and historians with disabilities as contributors to a wide range of scholarly interests.
The Professional Division officers and AHA staff scribbled furiously as DHA members Paul Longmore (San Francisco State University), Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Emory University) and your devoted president (University of California, Davis) covered a wide range of issues, from access to scholarship. Since the meeting, I have been following up with members of the Professional Division and members of the AHA staff, who have been working to incorporate a number of our earlier recommendations. On behalf of the DHA, I will soon be writing to the new president, Barbara Weinstein (University of Maryland), who I’m told is also receptive to making the profession and the discipline more welcoming to disability history and historians with disabilities. Stay tuned.
Elsewhere at the conference, the numerous panels and papers devoted to disability-related topics and our well-attended party proved that disability history has come a long way. (For a list of these panels see the DHA Newsletter for November.) Some will recall a time when the first-ever panel devoted to disability history was rejected as “too narrow” - the theme that year was Human Rights.
[Elsewhere in this issue of the Newsletter see the article by Brian Greenwald and Joseph Murray about ideal interpreting based on their unusual circumstances at the 2007 meeting.]
But we have much work to do. Our fellow historians continue to resist for many complex reasons, from a sense that they’re keeping the barbarians of trendiness at the gates to discomfort with the material and the people associated with it. Probably a far greater number are just plain oblivious, vaguely aware that disability is out there but this isn’t about me and there’s so much to think about first. I urge DHA members to keep submitting panels devoted exclusively to disability, at the same time that I’m a firm believer in “the Trojan Horse approach.” Join with panels where disability isn’t the central focus, where your work will bring that unexpected value-added to the vast number of historians who haven’t yet had the chance to think about what we do and its far-reaching implications for what they do. Every little bit helps, and little successes make for smoother rolling in the future.
3. The Latest Tales of the Disability History Chair
As devoted readers of the November DHA Newsletter will recall, I bought my own chair in disability history at a nearby thrift store for $65. The 100 year-old high-backed wooden wheelchair now sits in my office adorned by two stylish pillows from Target. During our department’s recent job searches, I discovered the chair had unintended benefits and powers. Not surprisingly, perhaps, there seemed to be a correlation between the kinds of questions candidates asked about the chair and qualities of curiosity and adventurousness I’d previously found in reading their scholarship, to the point where I could almost predict their reactions based on that je-ne-sais-quoi of their publications. On one extreme was the candidate who wanted to know about every little detail: where I’d found it, what I knew about it, whether the store where I’d bought it had had this particular chair for a long time, how the employees reacted, etc.; the book was full of great quotes and rich historical detail. On the other was the candidate with the concise cold book who bumped into the chair and apologized. I can’t wait to read the book by the candidate who insists on taking it out for a ride.