News & Events

What was once hidden will be out on display for all to see at the 2010 Vancouver Paralympic Games.

The award-winning exhibit Out From Under: Disability, History and Things to Remember opens March 9 at the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad. The groundbreaking exhibit, produced by students, faculty and alumni from the School of Disability Studies, pays tribute to the civic and cultural contributions of Canadians with disabilities. The School of Disability Studies worked in collaboration with Kickstart, Canada's national disability arts organization, to bring Out from Under to UBC Robson Square. The exhibition will be on display until March 21.

"Visitors from around the world will experience fully accessible visual culture that commemorates and honours the resilience and creativity of disabled citizens," said Melanie Panitch, director, School of Disability Studies. "This exhibit affirms the rights of disabled citizens to accessible and inclusive public culture."

Out from Under: Disability, History and Things to Remember highlights 13 diverse objects that reveal a significant aspect of Canadian disability history. The exhibition was prominently displayed at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in 2008, a partnership that earned both the School of Disability Studies and ROM the 2008 City of Toronto Access, Equity and Human Rights Award for Disability Issues.

Efforts are underway to launch a national tour of the exhibition, with the Paralympics as its first stop. The curators - Kathryn Church, disability studies professor; Catherine Frazee, professor of distinction, School of Disability Studies; and Panitch - have upgraded the accessibility features of the exhibit, to make it more inclusive and engaging.

The new accessibility features include:

o ASL podcasts - all exhibit texts were translated into American Sign Language (ASL) and recorded in 15 individual video segments which can be downloaded, streamed online or viewed at the exhibit site.
o Full audio description - detailed descriptions of all textual and visual elements of the exhibit are set against music soundscapes.
o Plain language audio tour - all visitors will have the option of listening to a plain language audio tour. Presented as a series of conversational dialogues, actors are used to provide context, insights and discoveries that bring clarity to the exhibit's content.
o Touch displays - replica artifacts were obtained for seven of the 13 installations. These are available for tactile examination for visitors who are blind or have low-vision.
o All print materials are available in braille, plain text and large print versions.
o Film - to welcome people with mental health histories and recognize them in disability history, Self Labelling and Identity, a documentary produced by The G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education will screen as an extension of the exhibit. The documentary chronicles the experiences of psychiatric survivors.

Moving the exhibit to Vancouver was a university-wide project. Interior design students, under the guidance of technologist David Loewy, built crates to pack the installations, and Howard Sculnick in shipping and receiving, took the lead in shipping the crates to the west coast.

Details on how the exhibit came together and the experience of making disability history public at the ROM are disclosed in "Out from Under: A Brief History of Everything," a chapter Church, Frazee and Panitch co-wrote with Phaedra Livingstone for the book Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum.