Exhibits: Ongoing and Past
Maladies and Materials: “The Stuff of Public Health”
A student-led and student-created exhibit that explores the material and print cultures of public health, and is focused around three broad themes: Vaccines and Vaccination, The Histories of Masks and Quarantines and Quarantining. The physical exhibit will be completed by April 2021, and will be displayed at the Bizzell Library and the Byrd Library in Oklahoma City. The digital exhibit will go live at the end of December, 2020, but will continue to be edited as student submissions have trickled in and been edited.
Disability and Technology in India, 1900-1950
This ongoing project examines the disabled experience in British India/postcolonial India over the period ranging from 1900-1950. This exhibit is an attempt to complicate and complement the kinds of histories we are able to tell about disability when we rely solely on the written word in the traditional archive. I am currently still in the process of researching this exhibit, and hope to have the digital part of the exhibit go live over January 2021.
Recreating the Cabinet of Curiosity
A student-led and student-created exhibit that sought to recreate miniature cabinets of curiosity. Students learnt how the cultures of collecting in the early modern period, and how they shaped scientific trends in the metropole. In particular, students were encouraged to use their projects to understand the history and emergence of the museum and its relationship to Empire, as well as the erasures of indigenous roles, sciences, knowledges and contributions in the production of scientific knowledge about the colonies. This exhibit is currently on display in the Physical Sciences building at the University of Oklahoma.
Not Disposable: Disability, Ableism and History in Oklahoma
This ongoing project examines the disabled experience in British India/postcolonial India over the period ranging from 1900-1950. This exhibit is an attempt to complicate and complement the kinds of histories we are able to tell about disability when we rely solely on the written word in the traditional archive. I am currently still in the process of researching this exhibit, and hope to have the digital part of the exhibit go live over January 2021, while the physical exhibit will go live in March 2021, and is currently scheduled to be located at the Oklahoma Historical Society first, and later at the Byrd Library in Oklahoma City.
Medicine and Anatomy: Decolonial Perspectives
In 2018, I worked with students at the University of Oklahoma to create a pop-up exhibit that examined the body, medicine and surgery in "non-Western” spaces. This pop-up exhibit asked students to use archive research, laser/3D printing to recreate anatomical models, diagnostic/ therapeutic tools and medical and surgical instruments from Chinese, Ayurvedic and Islamic medicine. In doing so, students contended with the Eurocentric narratives that are ubiquitous in the histories of medicine, and how to produce public historical narratives that challenged this narrative. You can read about the pop-up exhibit at RecommendedDose, a teaching blog on teaching histories of medicine.
Disability History through Objects
What do objects tell us about individual experiences of disability? How do they capture and narrate the broader social constructions and technological responses to disability? This student-led and student created exhibition was a part of the course I taught in 2019 titled Introduction to Disability Studies and used material culture to examine the experiences of disability, and married disability studies with public humanities. The exhibit was up in the lobby of the Bizzell Library, at the University of Oklahoma in Norman in 2019 and is now on permanent display in the Physical Sciences building of the University of Oklahoma.