I am excited to continue our work from last year and expanding to include more local and international colleagues and institutions. It was wonderful to learn about what other academics and institutions were researching and exhibiting and especially now that the work includes Canadian history and ways to create international solidarity and collaboration. It is also a great opportunity for us to learn beyond our specialties and especially for those in the US to learn about Canadian and especially Canadian AAPI history. As a Japanese American historian, I am also eager to learn about any connections and solidarity between sister cities Montreal and Hiroshima.
Since NCPH 2024, I have started my PhD in American Studies at the University of Minnesota and continue to research Japanese American disability history, focusing on the pre-war years and World War II mass incarceration. During my first semester, I took my first disability studies course and learned about many theories that I had been researching but did not have names for. I have also visited exhibits to learn more about accessibility and connected with organizations to help them make their exhibits more accessible.
I am also passionate about accessibility at historic sites, museums, institutions, and conferences and have also been working with organizations to ensure that conference presentations and materials are accessible. For NCPH 2020, I organized a panel on accessibility at historic sites and organizations and conferences. Among the facilitators was Ingenium, the Museums of Science and Innovation in Canada which shared their recent renovation plans. I was surprised and grateful at the extent of their renovations and learned a lot about accessibility. I hope that other organizations inside and outside the US and Canada can be as thorough and include accessibility from the start instead of leaving it as an afterthought. When disabled people benefit, everyone benefits and it’s past time that disabled people and their needs are included from the start.
When I joined Part 1 of this working group in 2022, I was an independent scholar researching Japanese American mixed race and disability history (and their intersections, though focusing on disability history). I was also consulting and doing odd jobs and writing my first article and book chapters about my research and research process. As a disabled person, I was becoming more involved in connecting with people and organizations to ensure that museums, historic sites, and institutions were accessible to all, and especially disabled people. I joined the working group because I wanted to connect with museum professionals, historic organizations, and academics to help them with this task, but also to see what was happening in the field, and especially in Japanese American (historical) organizations.
The rest of the group were in academia and museums and I felt quite out of place, especially when presenting. But, many in the audience were students, independent scholars, and others working in non-academic settings and it was a great way to connect and build community.
I hope that this working group creates a place to gather both during and after the conference to create international connections beyond the US and Canada that is sorely needed so that we can help and learn from each other.
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