CFP: Collections Uncovered: Disability at the British Library

Call for Presenters!

Collections Uncovered: Disability at the British Library – 27th November 2026 – 10am-4:30pm
Presentations in-person (at the British Library) and online (via Teams/Zoom)
The afternoon session is in-person only.

Join the UK Disability History and Heritage Hub and the British Library to explore disability histories. Presentations will highlight disability stories within the British Library collections, creating space for conversations around access, history, and future directions.

In the afternoon, you will get hands-on with selected material from the British Library collections in an interactive session! You will be invited to think creatively: making zines or collages, sharing stories, and discussing themes that emerge. The focus will be on co-creation and collaboration, giving everyone the opportunity to reflect on how disability surfaces in the collections. Discussions will hopefully help shape the agenda for a future PhD placement at the British Library, which will draw focus to disability histories in the collections. Due to the nature of the activity, the afternoon session will be in-person only.

We welcome contributions on topics or projects including (but not limited to):

• Disability histories in the British Library collections

• Disability histories in national collections

• Library collections and disability history

• Accessibility and collections

• Cataloguing and finding disability histories

• Physical space/access

• Careers in the sector

• Connections between the past and present

• Disability publications – activist magazines, community newsletters, charity periodicals

• Something in the British Library collections that has really excited you (relevant to disability and disability histories)

Submission deadline, Friday 31st July 2026, by email (details below)

We welcome diverse presentation formats from a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives.  Academic papers, conversation or interview styles, artistic presentations – your imagination is the only limit! Preferred presentation lengths are either 5 minutes or 15 minutes. Please let us know your preferred length, and if you will be presenting virtually or in-person, when you submit your proposal. Please note, if you are attending in-person, you will need to fund your own travel.

We’ll work with you to ensure attending and presenting at the event is accessible, and to prevent any technical problems arising. We hope to provide both British Sign Language (BSL) interpretation along with Speech-to-Text captioning (STTR) – we currently have funding for one, and are seeking funding to be able to provide both. Please get in touch to discuss access requests.

Please submit proposed presentations to ukdishistheritagehub@gmail.com titling the email ‘Collections Uncovered.’ Just send us a short summary (around 200 words) and a bit about you/your organisation (around 100 words). We are also open to video submissions, covering the same details, that are no longer than 3 minutes. If there are any accessibility concerns regarding submissions, please contact us.