Unboxing Disability Communication: Exploring the Methodological Contours of Critical Disability Research in Public Health Archives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article provides an account of the experience of conducting archival research on disability, including its interpretive challenges, difficult choices, and how researchers’ biases and goals shape findings. 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. Using our research questions about communications as a case study, we document how researchers navigate archival absences, make decisions about what counts as evidence, and construct interpretations from incomplete records. We describe three critical methodological turns: re-orienting, re-encountering, and re-searching that emerged from confronting archives organized without disability as a category. 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 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. We attend to our own embodied acts of communication: reading, photographing, pasting, labelling, and assembling seemingly tangential documents from across hundreds of boxes of archived material while simultaneously acknowledging the surveillance work in the library archive and our own preservation of some materials and procedures. Our findings about how disability is included as disease-like but excluded in many other ways in public health communication are inseparable from our methodological choices. What we found depended fundamentally on how we looked, what we decided counted as relevant, and how our commitments to disability-as-a-communicative subject shaped our seeing. This paper contributes both specific insights about disability communication and a methodological model for conducting reflexive archival research on marginalized communities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.060 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".