Cultural Heritage, Ageing, Disability, and Identity

Practice, and the development of inclusive capital

Simon Hayhoe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351370424
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Archéologie

Cultural Heritage, Ageing, Disability, and Identity examines the effects of disability and ageing on engagement with cultural heritage and associated cultural identity formation processes. Combining theory with detailed case study research, it unpicks both the current state of play and future directions.

The book is based upon detailed case example research on both the self-reported individual experiences of people with disabilities engaging with cultural heritage, and the accessibility approaches of cultural heritage institutions themselves. Hayhoe grounds the analysis in a theoretical and historical overview of disability and inclusion. He interrogates the various ways in which identity is formed through interaction with cultural heritage, and considers the differences in engagement with cultural heritage amongst those who develop disabilities early in life compared to those who acquire disabilities later in life. His conclusions offer insights that can help improve the provision of cultural heritage engagement to all people, but particularly those with disabilities.

Cultural Heritage, Ageing, Disability, and Identity is key reading for students and scholars of cultural heritage, visitor studies, and disability studies, and will also be of interest to other subject areas engaging with issues of accessibility. It should also be read by institutions looking to improve their accessibility strategy to engage broader audiences.

1 Introduction

Does the way we experience cultural heritage differ as we age or acquire an impairment?

Aims and context of the study

In Cultural Heritage, Ageing, Disability, and Identity I investigate this core question, the transitions people experience through ageing, and the process of forming or refusing what I call a disabled identity.¹ In doing so, I show how attitudes to cultural institutions such as museums and monuments can develop, and how people with disabilities can interact with cultural institutions in diverse ways.

Cultural Heritage, Ageing, Disability, and Identity also examines how cultural life changes from being young and growing up with impairments, to being older and frailer and developing impairments. Although these changes are rarely seen as a disability in the traditional sense, this book shows how they are affected by the learning opportunities, information and spaces and places we interact with.

Cultural Heritage, Ageing, Disability, and Identity also explores possible categories of identity, and introduces a model of inclusive capital that explores what I refer to as a sense of inclusion in cultural institutions – this model is also designed to reflect the experience of becoming disabled or being born with a disability, the process of ageing with a disability and the transitions to a disabled identity. Whilst describing this model of inclusive capital, I explore access to technology, information, historical objects, spaces and places by older and disabled people.

In Ageing, Disability, Identity, and Cultural Heritage, I narrate cases of institutional strategy and policy development, and the cultural practice of older people and people with disabilities who visit these institutions – these cases are based in the states of California, Massachusetts, and New York in the US, and the south of England in the UK.

The lives of the people I narrate in Cultural Heritage, Ageing, Disability, and Identity show different experiences of cultural heritage, developed through different educational and life chances. These cases are also a mixture of gender and age and were designed to tell the story of different stages of ageing as a person with an impairment.

Similarly, the institutional cases in Cultural Heritage, Ageing, Disability, and Identity represent different models of practice in the field of cultural heritage. These institutions also have to provide for different access needs, as per their environment, resourcing, size, and form. However, as I show in these pages, these cases shared the same basic principles of access to a sense of inclusion.

The aims of Cultural Heritage, Ageing, Disability, and Identity

Cultural Heritage, Ageing, Disability, and Identity has two aims.

The first aim of the book is to address the role of the following two influences on the development of cultural identity: 1) the role of cultural heritage as a human desire; 2) the roles of bonding, learning, information, space and place on a sense of inclusion.

The second aim of this book is to start a debate on how we understand access to cultural objects, cultural institutions, and cultural heritage through changing identities. These institutions can include, but are not restricted to, museums, national parks, and public buildings.² Through this debate, Cultural Heritage, Ageing, Disability, and Identity also asks whether inclusion is important to their comprehension.

The narrative on the museum and national parks in Cultural Heritage, Ageing, Disability, and Identity is designed to act as a guide for those who would like to develop or improve access to similar institutions. I develop this focus through an examination of learning, information, technology, networking, spaces and places of cultural institutions – this analysis includes digital environments, which I found were an increasing area of importance.

As important, Cultural Heritage, Ageing, Disability, and Identity also shows how older people and people with disabilities’ inclusive practice is developed through engagement with cultural heritage. Understanding these identities not only helps us understand how disabled and elderly people learn through cultural heritage, it also shows us how identities are formed through relationships with others.

In Cultural Heritage, Ageing, Disability, and Identity, I also make the case that understanding cultural identity is important in the development of accessible and inclusive environments. This understanding is important because cultural inclusion is formed in large part through access to and inclusion in the cultural spaces and places we all use and enjoy, and through learning, information, and bonding in these environments.

Subsequently, Cultural Heritage, Ageing, Disability, and Identity aims to develop a new paradigm of inclusion and cultural heritage, by theorizing that cultural heritage develops and maintains identity. Moreover, the book examines an individualistic approach to inclusion and access to cultural heritage, arguing that disabled and elderly people cannot simply be regarded as having a single identity.

The background of cultural communities in Ageing, Disability, Identity, and Cultural Heritage

The study for Cultural Heritage, Ageing, Disability, and Identity represents a change of focus from my previous research and practice of cultural heritage and the arts. This previous research focused on access to visual culture by people with visual impairment, although like this research it examined visual impairment as a cultural rather than physical identity – I discuss this form of identity more in Chapter 3. This research suggested that cultural identity, education, physical proximity to cultural artifacts and the process of ageing determined how research participants engaged with cultural heritage.³

This problematizing of exclusion was also based on an examination of literature on disability, exclusion, and institutional access, showing exclusion tended to fall on an axis between two poles. In my previous books, Philosophy as Disability and Exclusion⁴ and Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums,⁵ these poles of exclusion were called the poles of active exclusion and passive exclusion.⁶

The theory of active exclusion comes from the political theory of disability as a direct consequence of what can be referred to as an ableist agenda.⁷ In the ableist agenda, people with disabilities are said to be made to fit in with an able-bodied society, one in which they are seen to be at an immediate disadvantage.

What I called active exclusion was also based on a more general sociological theory of conscious exclusion, which has been prominent in sociological writing for several decades. In this interpretation of exclusion, the deliberate oppression of disabled people is said by authors to be likened to oppression based on race or gender. Writing in this genre can also refer to disability leading to oppression and an object of difference by people who do not have a disability or who think of themselves as a higher social class.⁸

An example of what I refer to as active exclusion is described by the disability theorist Pfeiffer.⁹ Pfeiffer found instances of legalized and violent acts of discrimination, such as enforced sterilization of people with disabilities in numerous US states, Canada, and several Northern European countries. Pfeiffer also found that there was openly expressed prejudice by politicians and institutional administrators against people with disabilities. These laws came despite Western countries’ rhetoric about the horrors of people with disabilities slaughtered and used in medical torture under Nazi rule during World War II.

A growing number of academics see that there is also active exclusion in cultural institutions. These writers feel that, as supposedly elite institutions, museums can be guilty of excluding people who do not fit their intellectual stereotype. As an alternative culture, the disability arts movement, as a separation from mainstream arts by disabled people, can redress this inequality in museums and galleries.¹⁰

However, the disability theorist Darke feels disabled art is often hijacked by non-disabled people in access and education departments in mainstream museums. Darke feels inclusion can suppress disability culture, and often removes political and intellectual content from new artworks. This results in a more sterile form of art that is less political, without reflecting the experience of being disabled.

Writing towards the passive exclusion pole finds that attitudes towards individual disabilities such as blindness, deafness, or learning difficulties, have largely evolved for arbitrary social and cultural reasons. These reasons often include ignorance and financial hardship.

In my early search of historical literature, I observed these struggles were rarely about a hatred of people’s impairments but were often the result of parallel cultural, social, and political tensions – this can include financial cuts to services because of financial hardship or tax cuts, or our need to simplify arguments or categorize people.¹¹ Consequently, the intellectual identity of disability and ageing varies according to physical, cultural, and historical environments, and affects services and the lives of disabled and older people.

Passive exclusion can lead to over-simplified classifications that lead to mythologies about disabled people. For instance, scientifically we classify people with a range of types and strengths of impairment under the single category, “the blind” – this is opposed to the individual needs of people who have visual impairments based on their individual circumstances, as the educationalist Warren has previously suggested.

As I argue in the books Arts Culture and Blindness¹² and Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums, this miss-categorizing of blindness often led to exclusion in the arts and cultural heritage. Similarly, in my other recent book Philosophy as Disability & Exclusion I also argue that naïve scientific beliefs about visual impairment change over time, and yet our mythologized beliefs about people who are visually impaired does not.

In these earlier books, I also wrote about the nature of our mythologies of disability leading to the exclusion of students who acquire disabilities early on. These mythologized beliefs often lead people with early disabilities to believe they are incapable of participating in cultural heritage or other forms of education in later life. Therefore, it’s very important as students, academics, and professional that we believe in the potential ability of people with disabilities when they are younger, and particularly in their mainstream schools. It further shows that the development of inclusive cultural practice is vital if children with disabilities are to feel included.

This led to the two questions that now inform my analysis in Cultural Heritage, Ageing, Disability, and Identity:

1. 1 How do people with disabilities develop cultural practices?
2. 2 How do cultural institutions engage with people with disabilities?

The rationale, methodology, and findings of the study

Rationale for constructing the study

Cultural Heritage, Ageing, Disability, and Identity was planned to address these two questions as a cultural anthropology of various miss-apprehensions and myths about people with physical and learning impairments. The research included observations and interviews with older people, people with impairments, visits to sites, document searches, and interviews in cultural institutions.

The study saw its participants as a part of two cultural communities. These two communities were “cultural heritage visitors,” and “cultural institutions providing access” – I write about these features in more detail in the following three chapters.

In my research, I also saw these two communities as being part of broader cultures, such as language groups (speaking English as a first language) and interlacing cultural heritage groups (such as American, Californian American, Latino American, African American, British English, British Welsh, and Jewish American) and sampled the cases of these communities accordingly. On studying cultural institutions, I also examined the spaces and places of their environments and the objects they preserved and exhibited, which ...