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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.
Summary of project results
Thousands of disabled citizens of the Czech Republic live in the asylums and cannot influence the public discourse. In the framework of the project, people from the asylums were for the first time given the opportunity to form a research group and to retell their experiences to the public. During the project realisation, the project promoter was confronted not only by the obstacles brought about by the organization of the asylums, but also by numerous instances of structural violence targeted at the disabled people.
The project formed a research group consisting of people with the experience with institutionalization and of experts in various genres of storytelling, to work collectively on recording, analysis and retelling of the life experience of the asylum “inmates”. The project promoter organized 12 workshops and tens of research trips to the places of memory, recorded hundreds interviews and collected hundreds of photos and archive documents, and through the collective research work remoulded the collected data into the outputs intended for the professional and lay publics. The collective research work was not only the main instrument of the creation of the outputs, but also an empowering activity through which the members of the group improved their competences in the area of disability rights advocacy and formulated common standpoints. The numerous activities in the area of publicity introduced the work of the team to the general public and informed it about human rights abuses in the asylums.
Altogether 8 people with disabilities, 4 academics and 2 artists formed a unique research collective (first of its kind in the Czech Republic) studying institutionalization. 32 university students graduated from the course based on project outcomes. 40 students annually use 3 educational materials developed for other relevant master’s courses. 2 scientific texts were developed and introduced to 40 academics in the Czech Republic and 50 academics abroad at scientific conferences. 8 podcasts inform and educate the public about the topic. People with disabilities and academics deepened their competencies through collaborative storytelling, teaching and research and significantly broadened public awareness of the issue of institutionalisation and introduced practices supporting the rights of the disabled. People with the experience with institutionalisation claimed their place in the public space, in order to “tell what people otherwise would not know”, and to “share the bad things so they do not happen anymore”.