Unboxing disability communication: Exploring the methodological contours of critical disability research in public health archives

Concerned by the absence of communication with and to people with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, we turned to the School of Public Health material archived at the University of Toronto to uncover preserved stories of previous public health crises. This article maps some of the methodological contours of researching disability communication as we excavated material from brown boxes wheeled out on trolleys by university archivists. Our methodology resists bounded chronology to trace new communicative connections across an array of material: letters, photographs, research grants, and public health lectures. We contrast the plentiful abundance of ableist internal departmental communication that is preserved in the archives with the illegible paucity of external communication to and about people with disabilities. Embracing the minutiae of ways such communication of disability is present and absent within the archives – a Newfie joke, an academic world tour, or a health promotion pamphlet addressed to an “ordinary housewife”, we reconsider the meaning of disability. We attend to our own embodied acts of communication: reading, photographing, pasting, labelling, and assembling seemingly tangential documents from across hundreds of boxes while simultaneously acknowledging the surveillance work of the archive and our own preservation of some materials and procedures. Revealing the possibilities of an interpretive disability studies approach, we map methodological contours we used to open three ways to address dominant narratives about public health communication relative to disabled people: re-orienting, re-encountering, and re-searching.