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Description
Life stories for human rights are stories lived, told and spread by people with disabilities, who have spent big part of their lives in total institutions. The asylums, creating unsurmountable gap between their "clients“ and the broader community, constitute one of major sources of discrimination and human rights abuse as defined by the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. According to many reports and scholarly accounts, the conditions in the institutions do not allow for respecting rights to privacy and dignity, are not favourable to relations with people and things outside the asylums and offer limited education and employment opportunities. Between the rights which are denied to people living in total institutions, the right to own one‘s life story and to share it with other members of society plays an important role.
The project will enable people with disabilities to form a research group and together with academics, students and artists introduce their experiences into the expert and public discourses. The outputs of the joint research will be utilised for creating a scientific monograph and articles, as well as in preparation of academic courses and a lifelong learning course. Readers and listeners of accessible materials about human rights issues in the lives of the institutionalized people – of the graphic novel, the podcasts and the web page – will enjoy the opportunity to read, hear and see life stories which have never before influenced the public debate. Together with people with disabilities we will add a missing link to the history of the Czech Republic – the true „peoples‘ history“ of those most gravely affected by the shortcomings of human rights protection in the country. The re-telling of the life stories for human rights will create discursive and political spaces favourable for exploring better versions of cohabitation, as well as point to concrete ways of breaking the silence engulfing lives of people with disabilities.