I’m here, on and in this project, because I simply couldn’t not be.  I didn’t choose the project (like many of the fabulous undergraduate research team members did) – it chose me.

I had done some other community-related disability advocacy and activism work in Ohio (while on the faculty at Ohio State University for 21 years) and in Kentucky (while also on the faculty at the University of Louisville for 3 years). But those were more containable projects with goals and known limits and ends.  (See: Voices Together: The Art as Memory Project) 

The MTS Memorial and Museum @ UConn Project is far bigger and more unknown than any of those previous projects I’ve encountered and engaged in.  The MTS Project is a case of “research” finding me –  rather than me setting out on a predetermined research path.  It’s something like “research at first sight” (akin to “love at first sight”) where I was utterly swept off my feet and then the project just overtook me.  

And yes, that’s a little complicated and icky too.  Love and research can be like that.

I wasn’t expecting to take on such a large-scale, deep, wide, troubling, meaningful project at this stage in my fairly long academic career.  I was thinking more about coasting into a couple of grand finale style essays and invited cameos for my last years as an academic – with 25 years now in the field of Disability Studies.  But then:  Jess and I literally fell into this project with a half-hour independent study conversation in my office late in September 2021. The world kind of flipped over on that day for me.

I am a disability studies scholar – and a disabled person – for my lifelong academic career.  I am of the “first generation” of such folx in higher education.  The MTS project brings together the best of the skills and things I’ve worked on, worked towards, advocated for, and taught about in my 30-year faculty career:  

• carrying out advocacy that is based on community; 
• engaging disability rights activism that blends study with struggle, education with the public; 
• re-telling and excavating buried disability history/ies; 
• combining archival research with narrative techniques and analysis; 
• working closely with student researchers and writers to learn, create, grow through the material together

I’m home.  I’m here.