New Thinking: Depicting disability in history and culture

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 4 November 2020

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This November sees the 25th anniversary of the UK Disability Discrimination Act. As we consider what contemporary progress has been made we'll uncover the long history of disabled people’s political activism, look back at the treatment of disabled people in Royal Courts and at fictional portrayals of disability in 19th-century novels from Dickens and George Eliot to Charlotte M Yonge and Dinah Mulock Craik. Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough presents.

Professor David Turner is the author of Disability in Eighteenth-Century England: Imagining Physical Impairment which won the Disability History Association Outstanding Publication Award for the best book published worldwide in disability history. He teaches at Swansea University and was advisor on the BBC Radio 4 series Disability: A New History. His latest book is Disability in the Industrial Revolution: Physical Impairment in British coalmining 1780-1880 (co-authored with Daniel Blackie). Dr Clare Walker Gore has just published Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. She teaches English at the University of Cambridge and is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker.

This episode of Free Thinking is put together in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI as one of a series of discussions focusing on new academic research also available to download as New Thinking episodes on the BBC Arts & Ideas podcast feed. You can find the whole collection here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90

Jessica Secmezsoy-Urquhart is at the University of St Andrews. They look at the disabled history of the royal court in Renaissance England and Scotland and the role of the Court Fool. They also make films and broadcasts for The Social on BBC Scotland.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps
0:21.2	it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream
0:26.1	van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.
0:33.3	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Eleanor Rosamond Barakloff, and Depictions of Disability is our topic for today's episode
0:43.4	in the new thinking strand of the Arts and Ideas podcast.
0:47.9	Hello, this month sees the 25th anniversary of the UK Disability Discrimination Act,
0:54.0	a civil rights landmark that's being
0:56.2	celebrated across the BBC. So in light of discussions about social progress and hope for the future,
1:03.4	we wanted to look back in time, exploring depictions of disability that challenge what we think
1:09.7	we know about how society has viewed
1:12.0	and valued difference. We've brought together three guests whose research all offers new
1:18.5	insights into the lives of disabled people. So to kick things off, I wonder, could you each
1:24.1	introduce yourselves and the area you research, Claire?
1:28.2	Hi, I'm Claire Walker Gore. I'm a junior research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge,
1:33.2	and I work on representations of disability in the 19th century novel.
1:37.9	David. Hello, I'm Professor David Turner from Swansea University,
1:41.6	and I work on disability in the Industrial Revolution.
1:44.8	Jessica.
1:45.6	Hello, my name's Jessica, Setchma Sawyerker.
1:48.6	I'm a PhD historian at St Andrews and my research focuses on disabled people as court
1:55.8	fills and dwarfs and giants at the Renaissance Courts of England and Scotland.
2:01.9	Thank you. Welcome, everyone. To start with, I wonder if you can tell me,
	...

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