Disability Justice and Community Archaeology at a 20th Century Eugenic Institution in Western Massachusetts
(Laura Heath-Stout, Stanford University)
Abstract: "Nothing about us without us" has been a key rallying cry of the disability rights movement for decades, yet archaeologists regularly interpret past disabled people's lives while excluding modern disabled people from archaeology careers. In my upcoming project, I seek to address both the epistemic limitations of an archaeology of disability done by nondisabled people and the injustices of systemic ableism in archaeology as a discipline. In collaboration with disabled activists in Massachusetts, I will be investigating the history of the Belchertown State School, where people with intellectual disabilities and others were institutionalized from 1922–1992, and contributing to the Belchertown community's and Massachusetts's state-wide reckonings with the histories of eugenics and abuse. In this talk, I will present the foundations of this new project and invite discussion of how to create a truly disability-justice-oriented archaeology project that contributes to both disability activism and archaeological knowledge production in meaningful ways.
Bio: Laura Heath-Stout (she/her) is a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Archaeology Center, a member of the leadership team of the Disabled Archaeologists Network, and a settler on Muwekma Ohlone and Ramaytush Ohlone land. Since 2016, she has used qualitative and quantitative methods to study the ways intersecting systems of oppression shape the demographics, experiences, and knowledge production practices of academic archaeologists. This work has been published in American Antiquity, the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, the Journal of Field Archaeology, and the American Journal of Archaeology, among others, and her book is forthcoming from Routledge later this year. She enjoys reading feminist science fiction, cooking, hiking, and spending time with her two-year-old.