In this brief history and roundtable discussion, a group of scholars, disabled and nondisabled, will introduce hiring and inclusion practices—tangible steps—that history institutions, including GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) can take in order to recognize and value the labor of disabled public historians. This paper explores the value of disabled labor through the experiences of disabled public historians. Our contributions are vital for the field of disability, crip, and mad studies (as community stakeholders conducting research), but more broadly, as individuals who bring their own unique perspectives and skills to a field that is increasingly challenged to recognize the diversity of historical communities. This roundtable discussion is the culmination of more than a year of monthly meetings of the Lived Experience Working Group, in which scholars came together to posit a way forward for the field about prioritizing and recognizing the contributions of disabled public historians.We acknowledge that the public history field has a rich collection of research and theory surrounding accessibility for audience members and visitors, most recently Alison Eardley and Vanessa Jones’s book The Museum Accessibility Spectrum: Reimagining Access and Inclusion and Sophie Vohra and colleagues’ article on multisensory storytelling.1 But little formal research and writing (in academic journals) has focused on accessibility and inclusion within public history institutions for employees. Some critical work has appeared in museum and public history blog sites and arts magazines, such as Yoti Gouda’s opinion piece about embedded recruitment strategies and the National Council of Public History’s (NCPH) 2025 History@Work series authored by members of the NCPH Labor Task Force.2 Two of specific note are Alena Pirok’s blog post about the task force itself and Madison Haine’s reflection with Julia Perratore, curator of Medieval Iberian Art, on accessibility for visitors and employees at the Met Cloisters.3 Because there are systemic barriers to writing and publishing articles in academic journals and books in academic presses, this kind of work is an good start, but it is important to bring the discussion of public history employee accessibility and inclusion into mainstream public history discourse.There is no better place to examine these topics than a special issue focused on the politics and ethics of public history labor, as disabled public historians’ labor often goes uncredited and uncompensated (or disconnected from institutions because of barriers to hiring). We begin with a brief exploration of the roundtable framework along with a history of the Lived Experience Working Group before leading into a conversation among its members about the present accessibility of the history field and why museums can and should embrace disabled expertise, especially as it relates to creating equitable environments. The piece is bookended by concluding remarks from roundtable members, along with two appendices with recommendations that public history institutions can take to commit to make their workplace culture and hiring practices more inclusive and accessible to allow them to not only benefit from but actively contribute to anti-ableist action in the public history sector.We intentionally chose a roundtable format to align with traditions in public history and museum studies that privilege situated expertise, dialogue, and collective reflection over consensus or comprehensive representation. This approach reflects how the Lived Experience Working Group itself operates and supports our commitment to centering disabled knowledge as a form of expertise rather than treating it as an afterthought. The questions that structure this roundtable were developed and revised collaboratively by members of the Lived Experience Working Group.Rather than convening a single live discussion for the roundtable, questions were shared in a collective document and responses were gathered asynchronously. This format allowed participants to contribute in ways that centered their access needs, professional contexts, geographic locations in the United States and the United Kingdom, and areas of expertise. Not all participants responded to every question, and this was intentional. Given the political, professional, and personal risks currently facing disabled museum workers, participants were able to choose which questions to engage with, determine how their contributions were attributed, and decide whether or not to disclose their identity. The responses here reflect contributions that participants felt comfortable sharing in a public scholarly forum at this moment.The questions move deliberately across interconnected levels of museum and history work. The discussion ranges from individual experience and workplace culture to hiring practices, leadership structures, and national political contexts. This structure reflects the group’s shared understanding that barriers faced by disabled museum professionals are produced across multiple interrelated systems. We acknowledge that because of who was involved in the roundtable, we focused on ableist violence in museums, galleries, and public history institutions in the US and UK. We acknowledge that although what happens in these spaces has ripple effects around the world, it is not the entire story of accessibility services in the field.Therefore, the roundtable format highlights both the diversity of experiences within the group and the systemic structures which actively shape disabled labor in museum environments more generally. To help readers understand who is participating in this dialogue, the contributor bios that follow are written in each person’s own words. Members share their identities (as they present themselves), the work they do in and around museums, and their reasons for participating in the group. These self-introductions provide important context for the perspectives that appear in the conversation. Please note that these authors only reflect a small subsection of everyone involved in the roundtable, which was a larger, more diverse group. After the bios, listed in alphabetical order, we turn directly to the questions that have guided our work over the past year.The impetus for our group started with a job description for a temporary contracted position which aimed to revamp an entire museum to be more inclusive of disability narratives. The position paid a wage that was below the cost of living. Additionally, it specified a preference for a disabled person but also included conditions that would make it difficult to put into place the changes that the museum sought. These included the status of the position as temporary, the requirement to work with unpaid volunteers, and the provision of too small a budget for the scale of the work.This listing represents a larger issue within the museum sphere: structural inequalities related to disabled people are perpetuated not just in job postings, but at every level of museum labor.5 Disabled people face multiple barriers when trying to compete in this field.6 It is a field which does not value permanent positions, does not budget adequately for disability projects and resources, does not see the lived expertise of the disabled as valuable, and does not understand that disabled people also have the right to see themselves reflected in the museum space both in terms of content and in the labor present in that museum.7All of these factors led Alexandra F. Morris and Wade Berger to create the Lived Experience with Disability Museum Educators Group, focused specifically on job conditions and hiring practices in museum education. This work builds on our prior efforts to support more inclusive disability narratives in museum collections, programs, and visitor experiences, while shifting attention to the labor structures that shape who is able to do this work in the first place. Rather than studying disabled museum educators as subjects of research, we designed the project so that disabled people are involved from the outset as collaborators.8 Group members helped determine the questions we asked, identified the issues that mattered most in their professional lives, and took part in collecting and interpreting data. This approach was intentional. Disabled people are often invited into research only to respond to pre-defined questions, rather than to shape the direction of inquiry itself. By treating lived experience as a form of expertise and positioning disabled museum staff as co-researchers, the group worked to address one of the earliest barriers many disabled professionals encounter: being spoken about, rather than being listened to, in conversations about institutional change.The Lived Experience project has been meeting on a monthly basis. Over the year of this groups’ existence, we have had eighteen disabled museum educators join us from both the United States and the United Kingdom. This has been an asset as we have been able to more deeply explore structures that exist across two very different countries and thereby compare and contrast experiences. In our conversations, we used several tools to scaffold our conversations and to support collective reflection, including focused discussion, iceberg analyses, and simple logic models.9 These tools were not treated as formal analytical frameworks, but as ways to slow down discussion and help participants move between individual experiences and the broader institutional conditions shaping museum work. Iceberg analysis, in particular, helped the group identify how day-to-day challenges in hiring and employment were connected to less visible organizational norms, assumptions, and power structures. Logic models were used more flexibly, as a way to map relationships between working conditions, institutional practices, and their consequences for the goals we have for disabled museum staff. We have presented our plans for this group at the Interaction, Design and Children conference in Delft, Netherlands, in 2024, and also led a workshop at the Association of Science and Technology Centers in September 2025.What is going on right now in the US and UK? This article was originally planned to incorporate feedback from additional disabled museum and history workers who had to back out because of increasing risks to safety and employment under the new US administration. How was your working group affected by these developments, and what is happening?How can museums respond to the historical moment attacking DEI programs?How can museums create a “culture of access,” and what does this mean?Accessibility and inclusion are critical parts of fostering welcoming history organizations and are the responsibility of all employees and publics. How can museums create buy-in for everyone to contribute to and be active members in creating this culture?How can museums create systems for incorporating discussions of accessibility into every aspect of museum and history work, including exhibition design, from the very beginning—and why is this important?What did/do you hope to take away from the Lived Experience Working Group and what do you think it can contribute to the wider museum and history fields? How can museums, universities, and history organizations take this model into their own spaces?The history field, as roundtable participants share, has been deeply affected by capitalism and ableism. This roundtable demonstrates that the exclusion and exploitation of disabled public historians are the result of deeply embedded structural conditions shaped by ableism, capitalism, and intersecting forms of oppression. Due to funding restrictions, many museums (particularly smaller, underfunded or independent organizations) prioritize the generation of revenue over labor equity. We acknowledge that this differs based on context. For group members in the UK, many institutions’ funding is entirely dependent on council/local authorities, national budgets, or the ability to raise money, and museums and public history institutions based in the UK are classified as either National, Local Authority, University, or Independent/Charity, whereas US-based institutions are often classified as 501c3 nonprofits. Similarly, while most UK-based institutions have free admission, few US-based institutions are free. These observations about smaller institutions, we acknowledge, varies based on location, but from our lived experience, many smaller and independent museums have issues covering general running costs and most external funding, sparse as it is, is often project focused.As a result, the wellbeing and inclusion of disabled and neurodiverse staff is often ignored, undervalued, or intentionally avoided, seen as an unnecessary expense. The field’s emphasis on short-term gig and contract work without healthcare and tendency towards low pay, consistent with other predominately female industries, shows how sexism, queerphobia, classism, racism and ableism intersect. Public history institutions such as museums must take an anti-ableist stance focused on hiring disabled museum workers outside of accessibility staff and disability history collections; only with these individuals can each museum intentionally collect and tell meaningful stories in inclusive ways and can museum labor strive towards equity. Disabled workers must also be valued as curators, front-of-house workers, educators, researchers, administrators, and leaders across all areas of institutional practice. At its heart, taking anti-ableist steps also necessitates examining the capitalist framework within which museums exist—as this article explores, individual programs aimed at hiring disabled workers often fail to address collective issues of hiring insecurity, classism, and labor inequality in public history institutions.During a critical time in the US and UK, when rights to healthcare, housing, and employment are being dismantled or challenged as Emma and Alexandra explore above, museums and public history institutions writ large have an obligation to reckon with how their very structures and leadership models have contributed to years of excluding disabled public historians, pigeonholing their work into accessibility education and disability history (although this work is important, it is not enough), and devaluing their labor. As contributors have illustrated, disabled workers are frequently hired to perform accessibility or DEI-related labor while that labor is undervalued, underfunded, or treated as expendable during moments of political or financial pressure.Part of this problem ties to present campaigns against DEI programs not only on the federal level in the United States but also in the corporate and nonprofit sectors, and it also stems from perceptions that DEI initiatives are campaigns to achieve short-term goals or solutions instead of ways to identify and deconstruct ableist power systems within an institution itself. Because, as Code said above, “if the core values of the institution did not change, then DEI likely had little power or influence in general. One of my personal critiques of common DEI practices is that they still center museums and other institutions, often acting as though the institution is doing a favor for underrepresented people while also extracting labor and profiting from them.” In response to Cole’s statement, throughout the rest of the roundtable, instead of discussing DEI the disabled public historians above focused instead on how museums can create a culture of access—one that acknowledges access resources are not a burden on the institution because accessibility is a tool and resource for all staff. As Code said, “creating a culture of access requires incorporating disabled (and other marginalized) folks into the fabric of museum processes. When the act of requesting accommodations becomes a burden to staff, the purpose of this accommodation has already failed.”But identifying and deconstructing power systems cannot be the end of the conversation—with this information, museums and history institutions need to identify and take steps because ableist systems of applying and interviewing positions often restrict disabled public historians before they even get in the door. As Emma and Sam highlight above, the steps to improve hiring practices can be small and low-cost but will have huge impacts, and not only for disabled staff applying for jobs. Accessible interviewing practices, including using captions, building in breaks, and providing materials in advance allow everyone to better show up and share their skills. Long-term change also requires creating pathways for disabled professionals to move into leadership roles. As Wade and Alexandra highlight, leadership shapes the very conditions under which accessibility is either embedded or sidelined, long before jobs are posted or exhibitions or programs are designed. Without disabled people in positions of decision-making power, museums risk reproducing the same exclusions, even when they claim a commitment to equity. As Wade said, “to shift this pattern, museums must create intentional opportunities for disabled leadership development. In our group’s discussions, we have started to think about building leadership workshops led by and for disabled people, creating intentional pathways into trustee and executive roles, and finding allied leaders who are willing to share power and actively support disabled colleagues.”The Lived Experience group is just one avenue for exploring and imagining what steps museums and history institutions need to take to imagine and realize an anti-ableist future, but what it represents—groups platforming disabled public historians, grappling with historical and present wrongs within the museum, and positing feasible solutions moving forward—is a model that many history institutions can draw on and mobilize, either as Disability Employee Resource Groups, think tanks, or consultants. But as Alexandra said above, given the scale of this work, requiring tackling systemic issues within the field, it has been approached as a “long term research agenda around disabled labor in museums.”Ultimately, valuing the labor of disabled public historians demands structural change, shared responsibility, and a willingness to redistribute power at the institutional level. Creating a culture of access, valuing disabled labor, and investing in disabled leadership are essential steps toward a more just and sustainable field. This roundtable contributes to that work by documenting lived experiences, naming systemic barriers, and offering practical pathways toward a more just and accessible future for the field. While no single approach can address the scale of these challenges, the collective insights shared here highlight the necessity of long-term, structural change. Recognizing and valuing disabled workers’ labor is both an ethical imperative and a prerequisite for museums and public history institutions committed to representing the full complexity of the past and present.The preceding roundtable discussion identifies recurring structural barriers faced by disabled museum workers across hiring, workplace culture, leadership, and political contexts. These insights point to concrete steps museums and public history institutions can take to move toward sustained anti-ableist practice. Although institutional contexts vary, the recommendations below emphasize actions that can be both impactful and practical across various settings.In addition to workplace issues, public history institutions need to consider systemic issues that can shape hiring practices. Before a public history institution can tackle an ableist workplace, it must think intentionally about how it is hiring staff. The financial and structural realities of the museum have barriers to employment and of opportunities that us all but have for disabled and neurodiverse museum and public history We this as disabled public history workers who have faced these systemic barriers when trying to employment in the field. As a result, one of the discussions was identifying actions that organizations can These actions are dependent on the context and of the an committed to their workplace can take practical steps at the hiring
Cieslik et al. (Fri,) studied this question.