People First Radio – October 2, 2025People First Radio – October 2, 2025
People First Radio
Conversations with historians and a human–animal interaction researcher look at how disabled people appear – or vanish – in archives and how pets’ mental health connects deeply with their human guardians. Themes of power, stigma, and mutual care run through both discussions.
0:00•3 Oct 2025
Cripping the Archive and Caring for Pets: Power, History, and Mental Health
Episode Overview
- Disability is described as a universal human experience that should sit alongside race, class, and gender in historical analysis.
- Archives often erase or distort disabled lives, making it vital to read records critically and “against the grain”.
- Institutional and psychiatric records are heavily restricted, raising questions about privacy, stigma, and institutional self-protection.
- Super-crip narratives and inspiration-focused stories risk centring non-disabled comfort rather than disabled people’s own perspectives.
- Pet mental health concerns, such as separation anxiety, often reflect both the animal’s environment and the guardian’s own stress and expectations.
“If you believe people have no history worth mentioning, it’s easy to believe they have no humanity worth defending.”
What remarkable journeys have people faced head-on against addiction, exclusion, and silence in the historical record? This episode of People First Radio brings together two very different but connected conversations about whose lives get counted, remembered, and cared for. First up, historians and editors Stephanie Hunt-Kennedy and Jen Barclay talk about their book *Cripping the Archive: Disability, History, and Power*.
They explain how “to crip the archive” means centring disabled people in history and treating them as “sources of knowledge”, even when official records erase or flatten their lives. You’ll hear how disability has been used as a tool of oppression against enslaved people, people of colour, Indigenous communities, and others, and how archives are full of both absence and uncomfortable visibility.
They share striking examples: a deaf architect whose drawings reveal a different sensory world, patients in psychiatric institutions who are reframed as theorists in their own right, and a Civil War veteran whose story can’t be fully told because modern privacy rules hide his identity. Along the way, they challenge the familiar academic triad of race, class, and gender, arguing that “disability is a universal human experience” that belongs right alongside them.
The second half shifts to everyday life with animals, as researcher and psychotherapist-in-training Renata Roma unpacks the emotional link between humans and their pets. She talks about rising concern over issues like separation anxiety in dogs and cats, how pets are increasingly viewed as family, and what happens when our own stress and mental health are reflected back by our animals.
Roma gently reminds listeners that the human–pet bond “is not a magical relationship” and that conflict or strain doesn’t mean failure – it just means both sides are real. If you care about recovery, mental health, or simply how stories and relationships shape our lives, what parts of your own history – or your pet’s – might deserve a second, kinder look?
Do you want to link to this podcast?
Get the buttons here!
More From This Show
The latest episodes from the same podcast.
Related Episodes
Similar episodes from other shows in the catalogue.