Another Way of Knowing: Resisting Eugenic Propaganda Through Community Archiving
In Brief: How do information workers resist the creation of archival “deathworlds”? With rising eugenicist rhetoric in the United States, sites of cultural memory face devastating impacts. These consequences are particularly felt by Disabled and multiply-marginalized communities. This article draws on Disability Justice principles and necropolitical framings to investigate how processes of erasure can be interrupted through active collaboration and critical reevaluation of power-sharing. By supporting alternative forms of knowledge sharing and honoring the lived experience of historically marginalized communities, especially those who have faced forced institutionalization, we hope to craft alternative methodologies that center community involvement and self-determination.
By Jess Petrazzuoli-Gallagher and Ashten Vassar-Cain
Introduction
As early-career community archivists based in the United States, we are entering the archival profession at a time of fracture, lack of funding, communication breakdown, and heightened awareness of our field’s interconnectedness with policy and power. As of recently, most of the news centering Libraries, Archives, and Museums (LAMs) revolves around fear and censorship—a new list of banned books, another exhibit removal, and persistent retaliation from the Trump administration in the form of resource cuts and smear campaigns targeting institutions that refuse to bend to their will. Like many of our colleagues, we feel an overwhelming sense of urgency, guided by the weight of unanswered questions.
Reflecting on our positionality, both authors of this article are Queer and Disabled. We come to this work from research backgrounds, studying the American Eugenics movement and the use of medicalization to justify violence against marginalized bodies. Our work places us between multiple streams of knowledge. On the one hand, we are students in an ALA accredited library program, meaning we have the support and formalized training as a result of our proximity to an institution. However, most of our professional work exists outside of academia. As community archivists and activists, our work is inherently relational. It is an iterative series of mistakes, reinvention, and stories shared around tables. Our work also carries with it the lived experience of navigating ableism and violence in our daily lives, including our own experiences of institutionalization and abuse. In our practice, we reject prioritizing knowledge gained in a classroom over knowledge gained through active listening, experience, and engagement. We recognize that Disabled people have had their authority as “knowers” and knowledge producers challenged (Fricker 2007). Susan Wendell describes how “disabled people’s knowledge is dismissed as trivial, complaining, mundane (or bizarre)” (Wendell 120). Our ability to physically access knowledge is often similarly disregarded, as inaccessible buildings further restrict the ability of people with disabilities to participate as full contributors to knowledge. Because of this, we turn toward “cripistemology,” coined by Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McCruer (2014), as an alternative to academic forms of knowledge.
Before we begin examining the process of eugenic violence and the ways it is continually recreated in our political and professional lives, we want to acknowledge that confronting this violence is far from impersonal. It is often a painful journey, especially for practitioners and community members who have been historically targeted, and those who continue to suffer harm. We struggle with the popular notion that the challenges we are currently experiencing are unprecedented. Rather, we are seeing a reinvigorated commitment to eugenicist rhetoric and policy, which have always been part of the American landscape and are enshrined in our social politics. This article examines our role as community memory workers in bearing witness and interrupting harm.
Our work is guided by Disability Justice principles, scholarship, and activism that moves beyond “rights-based” framings and toward collective action and rejection of all forms of oppression, domination, and exploitation. Because we see Disability as a dynamic axis of politics and identity, we choose to capitalize it in this article when it is used to refer to an identity category rather than as a descriptor. As Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha states in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, “I don’t want to be fixed, if being fixed means being bleached of memory, untaught by what I have learned through this miracle of surviving. My survivorhood is not an individual problem. I want the communion of all of us who have survived, and the knowledge” (Piepzna-Samarasinha 239).
Our positionality informs our ways of documenting memory. It has also led us to imagine and create interventions that challenge power structures within our own archival practice. Through our work with the Pennhurst Memorial & Preservation Alliance’s (PMPA) Community Archive and Special Collections, we are undertaking efforts to document narratives from the self-advocacy movement led by individuals with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities in a way that prioritizes original voice, honors lived experience, and expands access.
The Modern Eugenics Movement
In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, eugenics was seen as a “scientific” approach to control human genetics by limiting reproduction, resulting in forced sterilization, segregation, and systemic abuse and neglect. Eugenics and its connection to scientific racism were used to justify mistreatment on the basis of “perceived impairment.” Eugenics is one way that white supremacy violently asserts itself, claiming a scientific basis for settler colonialism and the expansion of empire. Sociologist Irving Kenneth Zola explained how medical authorities participate in enforcing state violence. In his 1972 essay “Medicine as an Institution of Social Control,” he writes that
the labels health and illness are remarkable ‘depoliticizers’ of an issue. […] By the very acceptance of a specific behaviour as an ‘illness’ and the definition of illness as an undesirable state, the issue becomes not whether to deal with a particular problem, but how and when. Thus the debate over homosexuality, drugs or abortion becomes focused on the degree of sickness attached to the phenomenon in question or the extent of the health risk involved. And the more principled, more perplexing, or even moral issue, of what freedom should an individual have over his or her own body is shunted aside. (500)
The understanding that medicine can be used as a tool to promote settler colonialist aims is sometimes referred to as Medical Imperialism (Schreier). The eugenics projects enacted by the United States resulted in over 70,000 forced sterilizations in the 20th century, though this number is likely larger, as many sterilizations have been performed without the informed consent of the individuals who had been subjected to the procedures. This did not happen overnight. It began with extensive campaigns by members of various scientific communities that captured the interest of policy makers, physicians, educators, and the American public. Eugenics bounced amongst America’s intellectual circles, ingraining itself in medical practice and scholarship. Detailed by Edwin Black in War Against the Weak, the saying “the taint is in the blood” became a prominent precept of the early eugenicists, who claimed that eradication of “undesirable traits” would result in a collectively superior “race,” and thus, collective peace and safety (Black 25). Scholar Marius Turda emphasizes a similar sentiment that capitalizes on the self-styled scientific theory of human betterment and planned breeding that eugenicists embraced. In posing biological purity as the nation’s responsibility, “eugenicists dissolved aspects of the private sphere, by scrutinizing and working to curtail reproductive, individual, gender, religious and indigenous rights. The boundary between the private and public spheres was blurred by the idea of public responsibility for the nation and the race, which came to dominate both” (2471). Such widespread influence on the “biological deterioration” of the human race captured politicians, doctors, scientists, lawmakers, and educators around the globe, and inspired horrific campaigns of genocidal violence.
The American obsession with surveillance and censorship weaponizes an idealized nuclear family, just as proponents of the early American Eugenics movement did. While libraries, archives, and museums contend with the removal of exhibits, Disability communities fear removal from public life, citing escalations that target community living protections.
In the latest iteration of American Eugenics, the Trump administration has waged a multipronged attack against Disabled Americans. In addition to dismantling of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Access (DEIA) initiatives, the article “The Trump Administration’s War on Disability” from the Center on American Progress outlines an accelerated erosion of civil rights for Disabled Americans, including:
- Weakening the government’s ability to enforce civil rights protections and investigate discrimination cases
- Threatening access to benefits, affordable healthcare, and resources such as social services and community-based living supports
- Divesting from public health infrastructure amidst an ongoing pandemic that disproportionately affects Disabled people
- Decreasing employment protections related to disability
- Attacking public education services offered to Disabled children
- Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s determination to “fight against Autism,” and proposed surveillance of Autistic individuals.
Actions taken by the Trump administration are most prominently seen in the July 24th executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets,” which calls on the Attorney General and Health and Human Services Secretary to
enforce, and where necessary, adopt, standards that address individuals who are a danger to themselves or others and suffer from serious mental illness or substance use disorder, or who are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves, through assisted outpatient treatment or by moving them into treatment centers or other appropriate facilities via civil commitment or other available means, to the maximum extent permitted by law. (Trump, Executive Order 14321)
In combination, these measures constitute a return to “Ugly Laws,” a series of policies spanning from 1880s-1970s that removed Disabled people from public life through incarceration on the basis of “disfigurement.” Historical ugly laws and eugenics legislation reveal two intersecting dimensions of marginalization that encompass the visceral discomfort of a viewing public and the pathologization of “subnormality.” Ugly laws were then used as one metric for policing disabled, poor, and people of color for being in public, heavily relying on them being perceived as “dangerous,” “immoral,” or “unsightly”. Under Ugly Laws (1867-1974), almshouses acted as an alternative sentencing for “unsightly beggars” and “physically unable persons”—marking both people in these categories as unworthy of participating in public life, and instead subject to management by the state. State institutions for people with disabilities acted as an expansion of this carceral system, funneling individuals between its iterations, where commitment could extend to the end of that individual’s lifetime (Schweik).
Eugenic rhetoric is also employed in Executive Orders that target LAMs, invoking language of “sanity” and likening reparative descriptions to cognitive distortions (Trump, Executive Order 14253). As information workers, our choices in language, curation, and collaboration have the potential to accelerate the process of erasure and create lasting consequences for the communities depicted in the records we steward.
The Necropolitical Landscape of Memory and LAMs
Achille Mbembe, an anti-colonial Cameroonian scholar, coined the term “necropolitics.” Necropolitics expands on Foucault’s “biopolitics” through a Fanonian lens, anchoring it in opposition to apartheid and occupation. Necropolitics explores notions of oppression and mortality, while emphasizing the role of sovereignty as “the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (Mbembe 2003 27). Mbembe critically examines sovereignty in relation to biopower, stating that war is how nations exercise sovereignty, enact subjugation and uphold colonialism. He imagines politics as a “form of war” and asks “what place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?” (Mbembe 2003 12). Mbembe describes the creation of “deathworlds,” or “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead” (Mbembe 2003 39-40).
Some deathworlds have physical boundaries, identified by checkpoints and walls. They may take the form of state institutions that house people with disabilities, immigration detention centers, or whatever new construction of the carceral imagination best serves the goals and aims of those in power. They can also be less visible to the naked eye, consumed in the form of “small doses” of death that slowly erode and constrict our personhood. Necropolitics is wielded as “the power to manufacture an entire crowd of people who specifically live at the edge of life, or even on its outer edge — people for whom living means continually standing up to death” (Mbembe 2003 37-38).
Museums and archives occupy critical positions in this necropolitical landscape, serving as repositories of historical evidence and active creators of cultural memory. Our institutions have the power to enact “archival death” through our curatorial choices. Archival life exists in the tension between preservation and interpretation, between fixed materiality and fluid meanings attributed across time. Archival death becomes particularly insidious through its apparent neutrality—the removal of exhibits, deaccessioning of materials, and reframing of narratives—while achieving the same erasure as more overt forms of violence.
Prominent discussions in the field of digital stewardship and archival processing ask us if we are ready to confront the fact that our professional practices have upheld and facilitated the under-documentation and erasure of people from Black, Indigenous, Immigrant, Disabled, and Queer communities from the historical record and what inclusive forms of archiving might look like within our field (Duff 124).
“Archival Death” and Curatorial Power
Archival literature and practice relating to disability has historically focused on medical narratives, accessible practices, and histories authored by those in power rather than the ways in which disability and marginalized populations are documented. These framings often result in a narrow, medicalized representation of people within our collections that fails to capture the complex, intersectional lives of disabled people. Primarily residing in medical libraries and government archives, practices related to archiving disability tend to focus heavily on the interpretation of disability in the context of science and medicine, relying on labels prescribed by medical authorities rather than the social and embodied experience of disability. Kelvin White’s overview of the genesis of the field of archival preservation in “Promoting Reflexivity and Inclusivity in Archival Education, Research, and Practice,” provides valuable insight into the field’s standardized practices that have been shaped by people in positions of power—mainly those who were not from historically marginalized communities themselves. (K. White 117).
The intersectional lives of people with disabilities and their interactions with medical violence and eugenics are erased, and the physical archives remain largely inaccessible to disabled patrons and disabled professionals. The record may technically survive, but the life within it does not. Archival death, then, is not only about what is discarded or deaccessioned. Instead, it operates equally through how/what remains and if it is actively hidden.
According to Tobin Siebers, disability can be seen as an “elastic social category” that changes depending on the social context, making a singular definition for archival usage difficult. Without a proper theoretical framework like complex embodiment —which Sara White explains as evaluating disability as an experience—archivists and political actors risk inserting their internal biases about disability, eugenics, and state-sanctioned violence against marginalized communities (S. White).
Beth Linker’s “On the Borderland of Medical and Disability History: A Survey of the Fields,” expands on White’s historical discourse and links the rise of the American medical system to the documentation of disease-centric medical history that often neglects disability. The academic study of medical history in the U.S. began in the early 1930s—much like the beginning of the professional archival field—largely due to émigré scholars who had been trained in medicine and the humanities in German-speaking Europe. These scholars, including Henry Sigerist, Owsei Temkin, and Erwin Ackerknecht (all of whom spent time at Johns Hopkins), brought with them a deep commitment to continentally-infused theories and ideas, particularly concerning disease. As a result of this intellectual background and the research interests of these influential figures, disease history became the central research aim of the newfound field of medical history in the United States. This focus was not predetermined but rather a product of the time, as the individuals who shaped the discipline were medical practitioners. The relative neglect of disability within medical history contributed to the emergence of disability history as a distinct field in the late 1990s. “New” disability historians explicitly defined their discipline in contrast to medical history, arguing that the divergences between the two fields defined disability history’s parameters. Disability historians argued that the medical model defined disability solely as a consequence of biological factors—such as congenital or chronic illness, injury, or deviation from a perceived “normal” biomedical structure or function—and seeks to “fix” or cure its effects at the individual level.
When disability materials are collected solely through a medical lens—cataloged under disease categories, described in clinical language, stripped of the political and social contexts that gave them meaning—the person is rendered a faceless patient rather than an agent. When it comes to records and legacies of state-run institutions, such as the Fernald State School and Hospital in Massachusetts or the Pennhurst State School and Hospital in Pennsylvania, sketches of the institutions themselves are widely available. The institutions are venerated, retaining a life of their own even after the buildings have been shuttered. However, former residents are reduced to gaps in the historic record. Family members and researchers requesting information about their lives are met with barriers such as incomplete or lost records, restricted access to records, or lack of resident perspectives. In a way, the archive may act akin to the institution itself, dressing harm and isolation in the language of “care,” and participating in epistemic injustice against people with disabilities and their many “ways of knowing.”
In “Documenting Disability History in Western Pennsylvania,” Bridget Malley highlights Helen Samuels’ documentation strategy as “well designed to address gaps in the historic narrative by ‘provid[ing] a useful framework for discussing selection issues,’” particularly with respect to marginalized communities (17). Documentation strategy as methodology “guides selection and assures retention of adequate information about a specific geographic area, a topic, a process, or an event that has been dispersed throughout society” (17). Documentation strategy emphasizes structuring the inquiry and examining the form and substance of the available documentation. This involves actively seeking to understand the documentary universe related to a topic, identifying where documentation exists and, crucially, where it doesn’t exist.
Traditional appraisal practices can inadvertently contribute to archival gaps by reflecting the biases and perspectives of the appraisers, leading to the erasure of marginalized voices like those of people with disabilities. Documentation strategy aims to move away from subjectivity by incorporating a deeper understanding of the topic and the perspectives of those involved. For Malley, the collaboration between Western Pennsylvania Disability History Action Consortium (WPDHAC) members (community experts) and archivists from the Heinz History Center allowed for a merging of archival and community knowledge, leading to more nuanced appraisal decisions and potentially filling gaps based on community-identified needs in the archives.
Archival death was built into the profession’s foundations: the same apparatus that preserved evidence of national progress systematically failed to collect, or actively destroyed, evidence of the state’s violence against its most marginalized citizens. As uncomfortable as it may be to confront, this was not an oversight. It was a feature of archives designed to construct a cohesive national narrative by using seemingly neutral representations of history that avoided critical insights into the past, and something that we must take active steps to remedy. The records relating to institutionalized individuals that do survive from this era—asylum logs, sterilization orders, commitment papers—were authored by perpetrators, not survivors. Even when disabled people appear in the archive, they appear as objects of intervention rather than witnesses to their own lives. When disability materials are appraised, arranged, and described according to the medical model, the archive reproduces the very framework that justified confinement and cure. The disabled person is preserved as a case, not a life; a diagnosis, not a history. This is erasure through categorization—effective in determining who the ‘dead’ and the ‘living’ might become to future researchers, advocates, and communities seeking to understand what was done and what survived.
Community-Led Collecting: Alternative Methods for Protecting Shared History
Community-based archives have emerged as crucial alternatives to mainstream institutions, particularly for documenting the histories of marginalized groups. These archives are often created by and for the communities they serve, prioritizing agency, self-determination, and the preservation of narratives that challenge dominant frameworks. Community archives intentionally subvert the “neutrality” of institutional preservation by centering the values, priorities, and privacy concerns of their communities. Community archives may employ participatory appraisal and curation strategies, working directly with community members to identify, select, and describe materials. This approach seeks to capture the richness and diversity of lived experience, rather than reducing disability or other markers of identity to a social problem. It also reflects the interconnectedness of “ways of knowing.”
In a 2022 interview, Achille Mbembe explains “the epoch we have entered into is one of indivisibility, of entanglement, of concatenations. Times of concatenation presuppose that our bodies have become repositories of different kinds of risks” (Mbembe 2022). Risk is very present in discussions of disability politics. “Risky bodies,” as described by Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese, are subjected to coercive forms of care (Hobart & Kneese), under the assumption that those living in the intersections of positionality cannot be trusted as knowers. One path away from paternalistic and colonial imaginings of care and knowledge is community-led intervention.
Some notable sites of community intervention we have encountered in our work include the Living Archives on Eugenics (LAE), The Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale, and the From Small Beginnings Collective. The Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada (LAE) provides us a realistic vision for the future of community archival practices centered on disability and survivors of the eugenics movement. Working directly with survivors the project “raised awareness of historical and contemporary manifestation of eugenics [by capturing and disseminating] survivor’s stories.” Interactive collections provide historical context to the eugenics movement in Western Canada and emphasize the bond that was created between curators, archivists, and survivors. The Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale situated Yale’s campus as the former headquarters of the American Eugenics Society, and their related collections as a site of harm and opportunity for reparation. They engage this troubled history through workshops with K-12 educators, students, medical professionals and the general public. The global collective From Small Beginnings is a group of anti-eugenics activists that helps educators and researchers learn of ongoing efforts to disrupt eugenics in action, and combats isolation by building a network of committed individuals and organizations. These projects meaningfully balance confrontation and collaboration through outreach and information organization.
These initiatives, coupled with the work done by the Disability Archives Lab on centering critical disability studies in archival research and practice, and the recent publication Preserving Disability: Disability and the Archival Profession (Brilmyer & Tang, 2024), inspired us to think about potential places of intervention in our own archival process. We established the Pennhurst Memorial & Preservation Alliance Community Archives in 2024 with support from the Pennsylvania Historic & Archival Records Care (HARC) grant, organizing materials collected by the organization over a span of approximately five decades. Despite being a volunteer-run organization, we wanted to ensure that we could make our records, largely generated by self-advocates with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, accessible to the public. Of particular significance is the archive’s Speaking for Ourselves (SFO) collection, which documents the critical role of self-advocacy organization Speaking for Ourselves in the disability rights movement emerging from state institutions in Pennsylvania. By centering self-advocates’ political struggle, agency, expertise, and vision for the future, the archive challenges dominant narratives of Disability, medicalization, and victimhood.
Our process required that we confront power imbalances and collective trauma surrounding documentation and consent. In our previous archival research and practice, we noticed that academic and state archives privileged the voices of medical and institutional authorities. Disabled individuals, especially people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, were excluded from authoring knowledge, instead cast as subjects of research. Our collections contained a unique perspective that was absent from more “traditional” state and academic archives, acknowledging People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities as originators of our records and contributors to social change.
After over a year of sitting in on community board meetings and listening to requests from the community for long-term preservation and digital accessibility, we applied for funding through the Council on Library and Information Resources’ “Digitizing Hidden Collections: Amplifying Unheard Voices” grant program, and were awarded funds to run a two year digitization project. As grantees of this program, we seek to digitize and make accessible over 9,000 items within our collections.
In order to keep us accountable to our mission and the community’s requests, we have implemented a series of strategies to aid us in our intervention. To us, this means prioritizing audio and visual material for digitization. We recognize that many of the self-advocates who originated the materials in our collections did not participate in traditional forms of communication or written record keeping, instead relying on dictation, audio and video recording, and other accessible modes of knowledge sharing and creation In an attempt to preserve original voice, we are engaging in consultation with surviving advocates depicted in our materials. We are also planning for quarterly access consultations with users across disability communities. These consultations will allow us to continually integrate feedback and ensure that the open access metadata and digital exhibits generated through this project are accessible to the widest possible user base.
Planning this project required us to reimagine what our role as archivists might look like. We understand that the self-advocates who originated and are depicted in the collections have had much of their lives documented without consent in the form of institutional medical records. To avoid replicating similar harm, we have decided to forgo a traditional “donor” model, in favor of a “stewardship agreement.” The terms of this agreement allow our archive to take actions necessary for preservation, make collections publicly available, and provide open access to associated metadata, with the understanding that the physical materials are property of Speaking for Ourselves.
We are documenting each step of our process so that we can contribute findings from this project to the larger Disability archival community, so that it may be replicated and expanded upon. Additionally, we designed the project to prioritize intergenerational collaboration, bringing younger members of our community in conversation with the historical context for our current struggles and learning from the voices of Disabled elders. Over the next two years, we are engaging in an iterative learning process, in hopes of fulfilling the request for digital access and making the perspectives and activism of self-advocates known to a wider audience.
Interrupting Erasure: How Archivists Protect the Future
Critically rethinking power and ownership requires institutions and practitioners to develop new methodologies that recognize diverse community members as primary stakeholders, and archives as sites of evolution and growth. This involves moving beyond inclusion toward genuine power-sharing and decolonial praxis. The archive becomes a site of active creation and a path to alternative “ways of knowing,” which in turn resist the creation of “deathworlds.” In “Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization,” Achille Mbembe affirms that
humanity is to be made to rise [faire surgir] through the process by which the colonized subject awakens to self-consciousness, subjectively appropriates his or her I, takes down the barrier, and authorizes him- or herself to speak in the first person. This awakening and appropriation aim not only at the realization of the self, but also, more significantly, at an ascent into humanity, a new beginning of creation, the disenclosure of the world. (62)
Many Disabled self-advocates have communicated distrust toward record-keeping solely dictated by medical and legal authorities. Disability community archives can demonstrate one avenue for grassroots preservation efforts that maintain disabled people’s ownership/autonomy over their narratives of survival and liberation, challenge dominant medical narratives that have historically justified confinement, and resist archival death.
The formation of the archival profession and of many LAM institutions are tied to colonial wealth and power. Even after constant re-evaluation of practices and strategic upheaval, LAMs come in contact with a different type of “deathworld” on a daily basis, and participate in decisions that determine what – and who– is remembered. As librarians, archivists, and museum professionals, we are responsible in part for making difficult choices with the collections we steward. We are also responsible to the communities depicted in those records. Speaking of Zola’s writings on medicalization, he cautions that “not only is the process masked as a technical, scientific, objective one, but one done for our own good” (502). Though not medical professionals, information workers risk modeling a similar attitude toward disability in our work, and participating in archival erasure under the guise of objective processes. Even as the risk landscape changes, we must recognize that our roles are not neutral. To combat erasure, we must take an active role in interrupting the weaponization of memory against the most marginalized. Interruption can take many forms, and requires ongoing reflection and adaptation.
Drawing on the practical work of building and sustaining the PMPA Community Archive, we are energized in imagining how LAM professionals can engage in active forms of resistance. The sustainability of grassroots archival work depends on the active partnerships between individuals, communities, larger institutions, and solidarity networks across libraries, archives, and museums. Without webs of mutual aid and professional collaboration, we all remain vulnerable to the same political pressures that have compromised larger institutions.
Dealing with histories of medical violence mandates space to grieve. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha invites grief as an active part of the process, arguing
that feelings of grief and trauma are not a distraction from the struggle. For example, transformative justice work—strategies that create justice, healing, and safety for survivors of abuse without predominantly relying on the state—is hard as hell! What would it be like if we built healing justice practices into it from the beginning? (42)
The stakes of this work extend beyond professional practice. It challenges all of us to consider whose lives matter in the American memory. The PMPA Community Archives imagines community-controlled historical preservation as a form of active survival and maintains originators’ ownership over their narratives of resistance and liberation—narratives that are urgently felt when policies seek to industrialize age-old structures of abuse and reintroduce the ‘legal removal’ of disabled people from the public eye.
Acknowledgements
We are deeply grateful to our Lead Pipe editors, Jess Schomberg and Pam Lach, whose feedback and support helped shape this article. We are especially grateful to our reviewer, Gracen Brilmyer, whose work we greatly appreciate and respect. This work emerged from and belongs to the community of self-advocates and activists who have shaped the Pennhurst Memorial & Preservation Alliance. Their decades of organizing, documenting, and demanding recognition created the conditions for this scholarship to exist. Their lived expertise, activism, and commitment to truth-telling made this research possible. We are grateful to be entrusted with carrying forward their labor of memory and resistance. Any insights here reflect their collective work.
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