2025 Virtual Programs
Welcome to the home of the National Council on Public History’s 2025 virtual offerings!
Accessibility, Disability, and Public History Working Group
Call for Discussants extended through 12/15/24!
Over the last seven years, the National Council on Public History (NCPH) has increasingly focused on improving our organizational accessibility and has engaged in projects that center disability history and disability justice. These efforts have largely been piecemeal as resources and time allowed, but with support from the American Council of Learned Societies we now plan to develop a cohesive and comprehensive strategy for becoming a more accessible organization that we hope can serve as a model for other membership and professional organizations.
NCPH uses working groups to address issues that call for concentrated, collaborative work. To that end, we aim to assemble a dedicated working group which will consist of public historians who will meet online throughout 2025. This working group will identify the barriers that limit the participation of public historians with disabilities in the professional development and networking opportunities of NCPH and its peer membership organizations, help NCPH develop a cohesive strategy to address those barriers, and encourage public historians to use disability as a lens for interpretation and historical understanding in their own work. The group will share their conclusions in the form of a written report, white paper, blog posts, and/or other more transparent, engaging means.
What is a typical NCPH working group, and how would this be different?
NCPH working groups are groups of up to five facilitators and up to fifteen discussants that usually form in October and work up through our annual meeting in the spring. They write and share case statements in advance of their in-person meeting at the conference. They are working to solve a specific problem, and from their work they create a tangible product (such as a best practices guide, a white paper, or a series of blog posts).
This working group will be entirely virtual and will meet from January through December 2025 instead of the usual schedule of our other annual meeting working groups. The group is charged with creating a framework for NCPH to become more accessible to public historians with visible and invisible disabilities. We would expect the working group to periodically update the public history community on its progress and to create a tangible end product.
This working group comes with a modest amount of financial support through NCPH’s receipt of an Intention Foundry Learned Society Extended Engagement Microgrant from the American Council of Learned Societies. Each of the five(5) facilitators will receive an honorarium of $500. The facilitation group will have a budget of $900 which in the grant we suggested as dividing in the following way: $400 for honorariums for accessibility experts to present or work with the group and $500 to provide CART, ASL, or other services for meeting facilitation NCPH will provide twenty (20) hours of staff time to support the group and access to NCPH’s Zoom platform to host meetings. This budget does not preclude the possibility of NCPH dedicating additional funds to the group as they become available.
What is NCPH looking for?
We’re looking for up to five NCPH members to serve as facilitators of the working group; the facilitators will lead the group and will keep NCPH and the public updated on the work of the group. We anticipate this role will take 2-3 hours per month from January 2025-December 2025, and each facilitator will receive a $500 stipend for their work.
We’re also looking for approximately eight discussants representing a wide variety of public historians. Ideally, at least one discussant will be a graduate student and at least one discussant will be in the early stages of their career outside academia. We aim to recruit with consideration for intersectionality and both visible and invisible disabilities, understanding that race, gender, ethnicity, and other markers of identity impact a person’s experience of their disability.
Neither facilitators nor discussants need to be members of NCPH, and all public historians are welcome to submit. Applications will be reviewed by an ad hoc group including NCPH staff and members of the NCPH IDEA Committee.
If you are interested in participating in this working group as either a facilitator or a discussant, please review the full Call for Working Group Participants in PDF or Word form. A plain language version is forthcoming.
Facilitator applications are due November 15, 2024. Discussant applications are due December 15, 2024 (extended!). Links to the application materials (which can be submitted via online form or email) are in the above Call for Working Group Participants.
A plain language version of this Call for Participation is available in both Word and PDF form.