Museum Crip Space, By Any Other Name

Abstract

Museums and disabled people can create co-designed spaces that lead to a more authentic agency for museums as well as their audiences. Together they can center disability as significant program and exhibition content, include disability representation and perspectives, and ensure that environments — physical, communication, sensory, and attitudinal — are accessible, respectful, and welcoming. This article reports on survey responses by disability community members and their allies when asked to imagine museums as spaces where disabled people can find common ground and discuss important topics. It also provides guidance to museum educators about ways to open new conversations with their local disability communities, advocate for change within the museum, bring disabled people into their museum's leadership, staff, and volunteer corps, and strive to provide in museums a space, as described by journalist s.e. smith, “where everyone has that soaring sense of inclusion.” [smith, s.e. “The Beauty of Spaces Created for and by Disabled People.” in Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alice Wong, 274. New York: Vintage Books, 2020.]

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