Profile avatar
profdavidturner.bsky.social
Disability historian, Director of the Research Institute in Culture and Communities, Swansea University. Vice Chair Disability Arts Cymru. Writing Disability: A History of Resistance for The Bodley Head / Vintage.
12 posts 7,458 followers 2,233 following
Regular Contributor

ICYMI: the many-headed monster has just launched a new mini-series on Visual Culture in #EarlyModern England. Over the next month we celebrating the relaunch of British Printed Image to 1700 by publishing guest posts on the theme. 1st post tomorrow (Thurs)!🗃️ manyheadedmonster.com/2025/02/24/a...

Check out this blog post by Jess Gregory, my PhD student, on indecent advertisements in public toilets in the late c19th/early 20th: blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/the-history-...

Artist y Mis Disability Arts Cymru Artist of the Month: Rightkeysonly 🎶 An EDM artist, known for bringing experimental beats and heavy baselines to the music sector of Wales. Dysgwch fwy am ei sengl newydd 'dRip' nawr: amam.cymru/disability-a...

What a pleasure #BSECS2025 was! Thanks to the organisers for inviting me and for everyone who came to hear my keynote, the biggest gig of my career!

Excited to be giving the keynote at #BSECS2025. Looking forward to meeting everyone and catching up with some old friends.

A fascinating resource comprising union & labour movement journals from @mrcwarwick.bsky.social

Hello, Radio 3. Do you have a picture of Béla Bartók right at the moment the lead detective asks him to open his fridge?

There is a fine line between talking about the history of public health & displaying disabled people as monstrous others whose lives represent an outcome worse than death. I am seeing what seem like “shock value” posts with old photos of people in iron lungs that really uncomfortably walk that line.

As part of Disability History Month I did an interview for the BBC's Access All podcast, discussing histories of disability and work and busting some myths. Listen (or access the transcript) here: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p...

My very first article has been published in the American Historical Review! ✨ In it I've transcribed a handful of petitions that help us to understand how people began to piece their lives back together following an outbreak of plague 👇 academic.oup.com/ahr/article-...

Lowercase #hashtags are inaccessible to blind folks—and they confuse everyone. In 2012, #susanalbumparty earned singer Susan Boyle the wrong kind of attention. Capitalizing #EachNewWord (aka #CamelCase) would’ve prevented the #SocialMediaFail. #LetThisGuideYou #AccessHelpsEveryone #Disability

It's Disability History Month and there are lots of resources on this year's theme of employment and livelihood (including a long interview with me) on the #UKDHM website ukdhm.org/category/res...

Come visit my current temporary exhibition: MAPPING AN UNEVEN PATH: STORIES OF HEALTH AND DISABILITY AT VERULAMIUM 15th November 2024 - 23rd February 2025 Explore what archaeology can tell us about Roman ideas about health and disability. www.stalbansmuseums.org.uk/whats-on/map...

UK #DisabilityHistoryMonth starts today! I'll be trying to share interesting material & historians throughout. But, as good an introduction as any: last year I spoke on 'Disability & Mobility Aids in Britain 1600–1800' & the video & transcript are here. dremilycock.wordpress.com/2024/03/18/d...

Disability Historians starter pack. The more the merrier: go.bsky.app/4MB7iob

Disability History Month begins this week and I'll be presenting a short overview of the history of disability and work at the online launch on Thursday. Details of the event and how to join can be found here: ukdhm.org/events/

#History hat on here, link to a brilliant online #Disability #coproduced #archive (needs print version for deposit libraries) But my interest area is the stuff happening outside these state policy/institutions 1960s on #GapsInTheArchives www.lancslearningdisabilityinstitutions.org.uk

We tend to position disabled people in 'cared for' roles in histories of the family, but in 19th century working class households they were also carers and contributors. My new article for JEMH journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Out today! My piece for History Workshop on the long history of disabled people's political activism and the Victorian precursors of the social model of disability

Over 500 online and open access collections of radical, left-wing, labour and anti-colonial historical documents listed here hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/radical-onli...

New publication: The Material Body, Ed. Lizzy Craig-Atkins and Karen Harvey. Great to contribute a chapter, co-written with archaeologist Sophie Newman, on using skeletal and documentary evidence to research embodied experiences of disability and old age in the Industrial Revolution.

A long-forgotten medical thesis from 1938 uncovers the physical and psychic distress of London factory girls. Sally Alexander explores Dr Garland's remarkable thesis and the lives which it documents. www.historyworkshop.org.uk/labour/dr-th...

Proud of my former PhD student Gemma Almond-Brown on the publication of her book, Spectacles and the Victorians, which examines how new technologies of measuring and correcting vision created categories of 'normal' eyesight and sight impairment in 19thc Britain #skystorians #disabilityhistory

Robert Saunders, 'How Do We Write the History of Brexit?' - an excellent article - now open access #skystorians #Brexit 🗃 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/UKAR2C...