Worcester State students will be able to benefit from the research on disability that two professors did at Worcester’s American Antiquarian Society last summer. Professors Riley McGuire and Kym Meyer, who both have a long interest in disability studies, attended a five-day seminar on visual representations of disability and are bringing what they learned into their classrooms.
Meyer and McGuire are professors in different departments—Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences and English, respectively—but they share a passion for introducing their students to the perspectives of disabled people and exposing disability discrimination.
“I infuse disability understanding in all of my courses,” says Meyer, who has worked with Deaf and hard of hearing populations, both as a teacher and an audiology clinician, and has hearing loss herself. “There’s a lot of ableism [discrimination against and/or devaluation of people with disabilities] in medical fields,” she says, so she tries to help her students see disability from another perspective by inviting them to critically examine representations of disability in the media. “It becomes a daily conversation about disability.” Since attending the seminar, Meyer has brought information that she learned there into her lectures.
McGuire tackles these same issues from a literary and creative arts perspective. “I have classes that are specifically about disability, and I have those that aren’t, but disability comes up in all of my classes,” says McGuire. “It’s not a niche interest of mine. Disabled folks are the largest marginalized population on planet Earth, and we should pay attention to them, and we should talk about those experiences.”
McGuire has asked students in his English courses to consider representations of disability in literature and art. In spring 2025, he will teach an upper level literature seminar called Disability Stories, Disability Studies that will look at cultural representations of disability from the 19th through the 21st century. The seminar at the Antiquarian Society gave him an opportunity to see what materials the institution had on the topic. He is planning to give students in the class an assignment where they will provide detailed descriptions of some of the Antiquarian Society materials that would make the pieces accessible to people who might not be able to visually engage with them. McGuire will then share these descriptions with the Antiquarian Society for their potential use.
The seminar, part of an annual series sponsored by the Antiquarian Society’s Center for Historic American Visual Culture that examines different topics each year, brought together participants from across the United States and Canada and with different areas of expertise. “The range of people that were there was really incredible,” McGuire said. “Some of us knew more about the disability side of the equation; some knew more about the visual archive side. So I feel like I got a lot out of their skill set.”
Meyer was the only clinician there, so she was able to offer a different perspective from the historians and librarians there. “That meshing of knowledge and how we brought that information together was really eye opening,” she said.
During the seminar, participants looked at a variety of materials, including photographs, engravings, children’s books, novels, periodicals, newspaper clippings, a circus poster, a board game to teach people fingerspelling, and cartes de visites—small visiting cards that people would drop off with just their photo. Many disabled sideshow performers would use these cards as a way of making money—often the only, or best, means of making a living at a time when so-called “ugly laws” banned them from public places. The participants then analyzed these images, based on their historical context and in light of today’s attitudes.
Founded in 1812, the American Antiquarian Society houses the largest collection of material printed in what is now the United States before the 20th century. Anyone can fill out a form and get a card to view the materials housed there. McGuire and Meyer said they were “awed” by the Society’s collection. They both hope that the connection they made during the seminar will lead to regular learning experiences for their students. They are both encouraging their students to get their own cards if they are interested in accessing these materials.
“The American Antiquarian Society is excited by the opportunity to engage with Worcester State’s faculty and students,” said John Garcia, director of scholarly programs and partnerships, who organized the seminar. He said Meyer’s and McGuire’s applications “rose to the top of the list in a competitive applicant pool,” and he is looking forward to welcoming McGuire and his Disability Stories, Disability Studies class and Professor Charlotte Haller and her Food in American History class this spring.
University administration is supporting other initiatives to increase accessibility and disability awareness on campus. Meyer is a co-chair of the Campus Climate Committee, which is establishing an Accessibility Committee that will look at accessibility beyond what the Student Accessibility Services office covers. Both Meyer and McGuire would love to increase the number of activities and clubs on campus that are focused on bringing disabled people together and building a sense of community. “I do a lot of work with our LGBTQIA+ Resource Center here,” said McGuire, “and I know that that is super important for queer and trans students on campus. Having something similar for the disability community would be amazing.”
“Ableism has been around as long as human beings have been,” McGuire said, “but so have efforts to combat ableism and subvert it and undermine it and find empowerment in disability. Seeing that this is an ongoing thing across history is both really exciting and really demoralizing at the same time. It’s like we have these ancestors for these fights and these conversations. But also, we’ve been grappling with this for so long and yet we’re still in a situation where ableism is so pervasive.”
“I learned so much,” McGuire continued. “All those different entry points into the same shared topic based on people’s identities and research agendas was really fantastic. This is a conversation that will never end, but we should never stop having it.”
Meyer agrees. “We can’t change all minds about disability,” she said, “but I’ll start in my classroom.”
Photo courtesy of Kym Meyer
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