Cultural Institute Literary Salon Series
‘Disability: A History of Resistance’ – David Turner in conversation with Jude Rogers.
Wednesday 7 October, 17:00-18:00
South Wales Miners’ Library, Y Storfa, 277-278 Oxford St, Swansea SA1 3EL
REGISTER HERE: https://bit.ly/disabilitybook
Despite there being more than 16 million disabled people in the UK today, disability rarely features in mainstream accounts of our past. That absence is not down to any lack of evidence: it is a forgotten, suppressed history – the result of deliberate choices about whose histories matter. For the first time, this book puts disabled lives at the centre of the story of modern Britain.
It tells a story of resistance and ingenuity, and often one of flourishing, full of people who refused to be silenced or pitied. We meet the seventeenth-century labourer, who fights accusations in court that he’s faking his disability – and wins; the eighteenth-century painter who signs her miniatures for royalty ‘without hands’; the nineteenth-century one-armed textile worker who turned his injury into activism, demanding reform in Parliament. From the mid-twentieth century, we see how disabled people got together to demand equality in education, housing, transport and the workplace – fighting for their right, not to be treated specially, but to lead ordinary lives like everybody else.
For this ground-breaking and campaigning book, David Turner has unearthed countless forgotten voices and tales. He tells a story not about ‘progress’ led by doctors or philanthropists, but a ground-up history of ordinary people demanding dignity and justice. And by putting disabled people back into the national story, reveals a much fuller and richer history of modern Britain.
David Turner is an award-winning social and cultural historian, with expertise in disability, medicine, gender and the body. Based at Swansea University, he is the first person in the UK to be promoted to a professorship based on their work on disability history, and his research has appeared in publications such as ‘iNews’ and ‘BBC History Magazine’. David also co-devised the BBC Radio 4 series ‘Disability: A New History’.
Jude Rogers has been a journalist and critic for the ‘Guardian’ and the ‘Observer’ for twenty years, writing about arts, culture and society, and also makes documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio Wales. She was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year for her 2022 memoir, ‘The Sound Of Being Human: How Music Shapes Our Lives’. Born in Swansea and now living in Abergavenny, she is delighted to be back in her hometown tonight.
Copies of the book will be available (card only) from our partner bookseller ‘Cover to Cover’
In partnership with Vintage / Bodley Head, Cover to Cover, and South Wales Miners’ Library
*Please note: Event delivered in English
