Interview with David Turner on his book Disability: A History of Resistance

In this interview from August 2026, Prof David Turner talks about how his new book involved listening to disabled people in the archives, and centring the disabled lives that have always been part of history.

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Interview with Professor David Turner

Laura Seymour: Hello everyone. I am Laura Seymour, a woman with white skin and blue eyes. I'm very happy to have here Professor David Turner, the author of Disability, a History of Resistance. Thank you so much, David, for, taking the time to answer some questions about your brilliant new book. My first question is, could you start by telling us who you are, what is your role in AMEND (which is the project that we're both, working on at the moment) and what does your book, Disability: A History of Resistance, aim to do?

David Turner: Hello Laura, thanks for inviting me onto this recording. My name's David Turner, I'm a white, middle-aged man wearing glasses and a blue shirt and a grey t-shirt, and I am a Professor in the Department of History, Heritage and Classics here at Swansea University. And I'm one of the steering group members for the AMEND project, so that means that every so often, I meet with Laura and the team to discuss what the project's been doing, and to provide any help or advice or support that I can, to bring this brilliant project to life, really. So, it's a fantastic role, and I'm really learning a lot from being part of this wonderful team.

So, yeah, I've just written a book called Disability: A History of Resistance, and it tries to basically write a history of Britain over the past 500 years that puts disabled people at the centre of the story. So, rather than pushing disabled people to the margins, or see them as sad footnotes of history, this is all about writing about the experiences of disabled women, men, and children over this quite long time period to look at how these experiences change and to look at how wider factors impacted on their lives - so changes in terms of medicine, welfare, social policy, and so on. But it isn't primarily about what's being done to disabled people, or for disabled people; it's how disabled people have shaped their own worlds, over this long period of history.

Laura Seymour: Thank you, David. Yeah, you describe the book as ‘a radically expanded view of Britain's past, one that is richer, more inclusive, and more representative of the diversity of human experience’, and I think from that description we can already see why: that is what the book is doing. Could you tell me what is specific to the process of doing disability history compared to other kinds of history? And also, what advice can you give us for our project ‘AMEND’, because we're analysing neurodivergence in the past?

David Turner: Yeah, so I wouldn't see disability history as a radically different kind of history, if you like, in that it doesn't require special skills, or access to secret archives to write it. It's a bit of a cliche that disability history is sometimes called a hidden history, and you know, it sort of implies that it's buried deep within obscure archives, and it takes some kind of -  some special historical skills to be able to access those sources and make sense of them. In the book, I talk about disability history as a forgotten history, or as a suppressed history, in the sense that disabled people have always been part of history. They are more prominent than you think in our historical sources, but disability hasn't been noticed in the past in the ways that other subjects have, or other people have, and that's, as I say, not because disabled people aren't there, but it's because of a kind of an assumption that disabled people never did anything in history that's worth talking about, or that they were always positioned in cared-for roles, or were sort of the subjects of medical treatment. And - and this sort of reinforces this historical marginalisation. It's there through the kind of histories that traditionally we've written.

So this is about, I think, seeing people in the archives: noticing them, listening to them, taking their words seriously, because disabled people - I've written a lot about their lives, and these provide us with very interesting and very rich insights into what it was like to be disabled in the past. And so this really is what disability history tries to do.

As I mentioned a moment ago, it is different to a kind of medical history, where the approach might be to highlight different interventions into disabled people's lives, different kinds of therapies, or treatment, or the recognition of certain categories of disease or disabling medical condition, and think about how these evolve over time. I mean, these are all important up to a point in terms of trying to understand the wider context in which people viewed disabled people at particular moments in history, but disability history is about, sort of, about different things, really. It's about the ways in which people with non-normative, bodies or minds experience oppression in certain contexts. It's about how they lived with these physical, sensory, and intellectual impairments rather than, sort of, prioritizing a kind of medicalized perspective of diagnosis and treatment. So this is - so yeah, in a sense, then, this differentiates disability history from conventional medical history.

And so disability history has developed as a subfield of historical research, particularly since the turn of the millennium. It's really developed into a field with its own questions and priorities, and, you know that sort of shows how it's a field that's engaging more and more scholars, and there’s some really fascinating work going on. My book tries to give a flavour of that, and hopefully opens up opportunities for other people to research this history themselves.

The other part of your question was about what kind of advice, as a disability historian, I give to people looking at neurodivergence in the past. I think there's, you know, there's some very similar things that we're doing, and so, I think the looking beyond a kind of medicalized perspective is, I think, important to histories of neurodivergence as well. You know, this isn't just charting the rise and fall of particular diagnostic categories, but it's also – but it's really about people, and it's about people who may have thought, or behaved, or spoke, or communicated differently to others in the past. And that focus on difference and diversity, and recognizing and respecting diversity, is something that disability history and the history of neurodivergence share.

Laura Seymour: Thank you, David. Yeah, and just coming back to what you said earlier in your answer about listening to disabled people, you know, writing about themselves in the archives and taking that seriously, I think that also holds true for neurodivergence.

David Turner: Yeah, definitely, yeah, I think it's often about approaching sources in a different way, in perhaps in a more open way. And actually, it's maybe a sort of sense that we might - of course, we bring our own perspectives to those texts, but actually to be open to people thinking differently, or having different ideas about

what it is to live differently in the world, and, yeah, being respectful and open to those possibilities. And that feels very exciting to me. You know -  it helps us to think about history, not just as a kind of repository of lessons that we need to learn from, but as something which opens up a realm of human experience that's quite alien to us, and that's curious and interesting, and something we might want to learn more about.

Laura Seymour: That is beautiful. Thank you so much, David. In terms of people that we would like to know more about, as you well know, probably my favourite section of your book is on the suffragette May Billinghurst, whom you describe as ‘an Edwardian Boudicca’, which is probably my favourite line in the book. I think perhaps it would be contrary to what you were doing in the book to sort of identify one person as being most interesting or more important than anyone else. But was there any figure from the book that you found interesting or surprising to research, that you'd like to tell us about?

David Turner: How long have we got? I could speak for hours, because, you know, in each chapter, I've wanted to kind of draw out these lives that people would probably not have heard about before. I mean, there are figures like May Billinghurst who I think, are becoming a bit better known, just because she's such a sort of kick-ass figure, really. But there's still so many disabled people we don't know about in history, and you know, many, many more that I couldn't include in the book.

I think if I was going to just draw one example, the book starts with a man called James Wilson, and he, in many ways, is the sort of inspirational figure, and I use that term very guardedly, because inspiration is a problematic term in the disability world. But he's inspiring in all the good ways, I think, in the sense that he was the first person I've found to have written a history of disability, at least one in English. And he has a very interesting backstory. So, he is born in Richmond, Virginia, during the American War of Independence. His family fight on the British side and are exiled from their community. Eventually, they, set sail for Liverpool to start a new life, and on that crossing over the Atlantic, James, who's just 4 years old, loses both of his parents, and he also contracts smallpox, which means that he loses his eyesight. So he's put ashore in Belfast, and put in the charge of a parish nurse who raises him. And, you know, he… and as he grows up, he becomes quite independent, so he learns how to navigate his local community by using his other senses. And, he does various jobs, but he becomes absolutely passionate about literature. And so he- so although he can't see to read himself, he joins something called the Belfast Literary Society in 1804, and he gets members to read to him. And as they read to him, he realizes that Blind people like himself are not considered properly.

Laura Seymour: Interesting...

David Turner: There are, you know, there are plenty of blind figures around, but none of these discussions of blindness really do so from the perspective of what it's like to live with sight loss. And so, in 1813, he placed an advert in a local magazine announcing his great literary project: that he's going to research and write his history of blind people, which he publishes in 1821 as Biography of the Blind. And so it brings together blind people's lives across history. It starts in the ancient world with Homer, and goes through to people in his own time at the beginning of the 19th century, and it includes very famous people, but also quite obscure people as well. And the longest biography in there is his own, because he… before he even gets to Homer, he's written over 100 pages about himself, which is a gift for historians like me.

He doesn't actually say anything, intriguingly, actually, about his process of writing, which is quite frustrating for me, but he does say a lot about his own circumstances. And, so this book has a kind of overcoming feel to it: all these blind people, in spite of being blind, have done interesting things. But it's not simply that kind of supercrip narrative that we critique today. It's about, sort of, blind people's ways of knowing the world, and so he talks about different ways in which blind people navigate their environment, or they invent things to help them do certain tasks. So it's about sort of thinking with blindness, if you like, rather than just saying, you know, blind people have done lots of interesting things and we need to know about them. So that's - so he’s the first person to think about disability, albeit just one impairment, as something which has a history, and these histories mattering. That makes Wilson a real kind of guiding figure to the book that I wrote. So the book starts with a preface, talking about James Wilson.

After he published this book, he seemed to have gone on the world's longest book tour as well, which seemed to last about 25 years, and eventually he dies on this book tour, in the Isle of Man of all places. But he had quite an interesting way of selling his book: he'd sort of tour around the country, he would place an advert in the local newspaper announcing his arrival in town, and where he was staying, and then sort of saying that people could come and meet him and buy his book, and that seems to have sustained him for quite a long time.

Laura Seymour: That is absolutely fascinating. I mean, also, inspiring as an academic, maybe? I wonder if you will be including a 100-page biography of yourself in your next book. I think this will relate probably to your answer to my next question, which is about how, in some of your other work, you've talked about how neurodiversity stories are hidden inside disability stories. What, to your mind, is the relationship between neurodiversity studies and disability studies?

David Turner: It's a really interesting question. So, at the beginning of this year, I was part of the panel that your project organized at a conference on disability held at the Globe Theatre, and I talked about James Wilson there, not in the context of sight loss, but in terms of traces of neurodivergence in his writing. So, as well as talking about -  well, actually, as part of talking about blindness, he talks about memory, for example, and obviously his own memory became very well developed. It's a way of sort of absorbing all this literature that was being read to him, and being able to then synthesize it and and turn it into this epic history.

But, you know, remembering things seemed to have an importance to him beyond the kind of recall of facts. He writes about the pleasures of memory, and memory is a kind of physical thing, rather than just a, sort of, cognitive ability. It's about having this sort of sensation of pleasure, being able to recall every ship in the British Navy, and he seems to have repeated these things quite regularly, and so, yeah, I think thinking about something like that as something which connects a more conventional disability history with a newer area, thinking about neurodivergence and different cognitive styles, is something that's very intriguing. And I think that just as disability is often hidden in plain sight, neurodivergence is too, and sometimes it's hidden within narratives where we've prioritised physical or sensory impairments over neurodivergence.

There's another person I talk about in the book who I think would also be really interesting to look at through a neurodivergent lens, and this is the 18th century anti-slavery campaigner Benjamin Lay, who is written about in terms of his physical difference. He was a person of small stature, a member of the Quaker community, and he railed against the keeping of enslaved people by Quakers in Pennsylvania for most of his life. So for historians, his story is often talked about, I think, in terms of this almost like David versus Goliath kind of theme of this literally small person standing up against this large institution of slavery. And so, you know, Lay's physical difference might have made him more empathetic to other people who are marginalised in society, like enslaved people.

But other parts of Lays’s history and his writings are really interesting from a neurodivergent perspective, because contemporary commentary focused just as much on his behaviour as it did about his appearance and his writing. He wrote one book against the keeping of slaves, and that book is often seen as an unreadable text because it's written in a very idiosyncratic way. It's, you know, he will - it's got passages copied out of scriptural sources, it's got old texts by other people just copied into it. Then it suddenly goes to autobiography, then it goes to, kind of, theological meditation. And Lay himself just says -  you know, he apologises for it, says, I'm just a poor common sailor and so please forgive my writing. But the way he organizes this stuff, again, it’s, I think, quite interesting from a neurodivergent perspective.

And some of his political actions are, also quite - quite strange, I think, or seen as quite strange and odd by contemporaries. He had a neighbour who kept a young girl as a slave in their family. And so Lay wanted to show to that family that this was a deeply wrong thing for them to do, that this poor enslaved girl had been taken away from her parents, and this must have been very traumatic for her. But the way he did that was by kidnapping the family's own daughter, which must have been a terrifying experience for that little girl as well. But Lay wanted to make that kind of - but Lay saw a very clear moral equivalence between what the family had done in enslaving a child, and, you know, the only way to make them understand that would be to do this through losing their child themselves, at least temporarily. And so, that very definite way of thinking, which is quite at odds with expected social behaviour, I think is very interesting in his case. So, I think there's more to be said there.

Yeah, there are some really interesting overlaps between disability studies and neurodiversity studies. I know not everybody who works in neurodiversity studies is happy to see it as part of disability studies. I think that possibly one reason for that is because disability studies has often focused on social barriers faced by disabled people, thanks to the social model of disability, whereas work on neurodiversity is aware of those things, but also kind of more interested in the individual, and their particular experiences which I think disability history has sort of embraced as well, looking at individual experience of things such as pain and fatigue, as well as social barriers, as well. So that's a very long-winded answer to say that I think the two have a lot in common, and I think there's kind of scope for neurodiversity studies to explore some, texts we might associate with physical or other kinds of disabilities from a neurodivergent perspective.

Laura Seymour: Yeah, thank you, and what I'm hearing from you as well is that it's not just the content of the text, it's also the style. Because one thing we're really interested in in the AMEND project is about how normative ideas of what makes good reading and writing can be ableist, and what kinds of messages are heard and not heard when we only read things that are kind of normatively written - you know, ‘well-organised’, whatever that means. And this seems like a really - this text by Lay seems like such a good example of that, if we're reading it neurodivergently.

David Turner: Yeah, yeah, it is just right from the outset, it is criticized for its lack of literary merit, and that seems to, you know - that does seem to be a very, kind of, ableist way of reading these ideas. I was actually really surprised that I got on really well with this text, actually. I came to it expecting that this would be a very, very, very difficult thing to read, but I can - when you start to sort of try and think with Lay, you can sort of see, see how his mind is working on this, and linking these ideas together, and I found it very, very clear, really. But it has long frustrated readers.

Laura Seymour: That's so interesting. My final question was going to be what you're going to be working on next, and what we can look forward to next, but I just wanted to ask, before that, is there anything within our discussion that you, have wanted to say that you haven't been able to say?

David Turner: Well, only, I suppose, that I might just say a little bit about the subtitle of the book, A History of Resistance, because, as I said at the beginning, this isn't a sort of top-down kind of history of medical intervention and so on, this is a history of experience, and I use the term resistance as a way of thinking about disabled people's agency. And, I'm influenced by some work in disability studies, which thinks about resistance as having two elements to it. One is a kind of pushing back against harmful treatment or representation, something like that. But the other is the kind of drawing in to disabled people's worlds, so that writing about experience: to present different lives, like Wilson was doing in Biography of the Blind. That is a really important part of this as well. So I found ‘resistance’ a more flexible concept to use than, say, activism, because, you know, part of the book is talking about the rise of disability activism, so it goes up to, recent times, the disability rights movement of the 1970s and 80s and 90s, and then the anti-austerity activism of the 2010s, but it's not just a history of disability activism, it is more - something that's a bit more wide-ranging, but which shows the multiple ways in which disabled people have pushed back against harmful treatments, and throughout history have had to fight for rights and recognition.

Laura Seymour: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, David. You have just come back from your own book tour, I think, of this book, so I hope my question doesn't seem too premature, but, can you tell us what you're going to be working on next?

David Turner: Yeah, it’s a strange point of when you finish a really big project, and I've been working on/in disability history now for 20 years, and so this book sort of seemed like a really - like an opportunity to bring together all that these things I've learned over that time, as well as some new research. So, so yeah, I'm thinking now about where I go next.

I think in terms of academic research, there's quite a lot of scope still for engaging with the material body. What happens when we bring together cultural representations of embodied experience with physical evidence -  from reports from skeletal collections and things like that? So I'm trying to put together some thoughts about that, and that might be a new project that I look into. But I'm also really interested in neurodivergence, and it has been one of the joys of being part of the AMEND project’s Steering Group not just to be able to advise the team on various things, but also to learn from you. And so I'm very interested in doing some research of my own into historical experiences of neurodivergence, which, like this book I’ve just written, would focus on a period before the 20th century. I'm really interested in periods where modern categories aren't really formed, and the interesting range of ideas that people had in the past to think about certain kinds of difference, you know? That's something I'd like to explore further, learning from what you're doing in this project.

Laura Seymour: Fantastic. I'm excited for that already. Professor David Turner, thank you so much for coming to talk about your research and your new book, for the AMEND project. I really appreciate it, and it's been really wonderful to hear more about a book that, as you know, I really enjoyed reading.

David Turner

: Thanks. Thanks very much.