Project
Disability activism developed in the second half of the twentieth century in a world divided by the Cold War. While the history of how Western activists learned to speak in the language of civil rights is well documented and publicly celebrated, the legacies of activists from the socialist countries have been largely erased after the collapse of the communist governments. In her project, Ambassadors of Social Progress. A History of International Blind Activism During the Cold War, Maria Cristina Galmarini offers a more complete and nuanced history of the international disability movement than existing Western-oriented narratives. By focusing on blind activists from the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic, Galmarini reveals that philosophies and practices from the socialist side shaped the historical course of global disability advocacy and provided a viable alternative to the approaches used in liberal democracies. Her critical evaluation of blind advocacy under socialism introduces debates over disability paradigms as a key issue in the history of Cold War Europe. It also changes the historiography of cultural diplomacy by complicating the able-bodied imagery on which we assume states relied during the Cold War.
Short bio
Maria Cristina Galmarini is Associate Professor of History and Global Studies at William & Mary. Her teaching and research span a broad range of topics, including social rights in the Soviet Union and the history of disability under socialism. Her first book, The Right to Be Helped. Deviance, Entitlement, and the Soviet Moral Order (Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), addressed understandings of social rights among marginalized groups in the early revolutionary and Stalinist Soviet Union. She has published peer-reviewed scholarly articles in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, The Slavic Review, Historical Research, European History Quarterly, and The Russian Review. Galmarini has won the Disability History Association’s award for best published article in the field of Disability History in 2018 and is currently working on a new project titled Ambassadors of Social Progress. A History of International Blind Activism During the Cold War.