Humour and polemic in UK disability arts and its institutions, 1976-2010

My research will investigate humour as a form of activism, a key strategy in the UK Disability Arts Movement. Art history and disability studies have neglected these artists, who created institutions essential to UK arts today, while engaging with the complexity of changing ideas and definitions of disability through the period 1976-2010, as documented in the under-researched National Disability Arts Collection and Archives. Drawing on this archive and supported by interviews with the movement?s artists, my interdisciplinary project will combine historiographical research with sensory ethnography and object-orientated creative practice. A study of this polemical humour?s collectivity and its tactical use in disability activism is urgent at a time when the experience of disability is increasingly individualised. This project will inform social policy for disability arts, re-position disability activism within art history, and inform critical understanding of how ideas of disability are influenced and understood by disabled people and disabled communities.