Research project
Bridging Minds: Disability and Friendship since the 1960s from a Transnational Moral History Perspective (DisFriend)
This project aims to write a transnational moral history of friendships between people with and without cognitive disabilities since the 1960s, that offers a new understanding of why people with cognitive disabilities experience more loneliness than the general population.
- Duration
- 2026 - 2031
- Contact
- Paul van Trigt
- Funding
-
ERC Consolidator Grant
According to a 2023 survey, 24% of the global population felt “very lonely”. This percentage is even higher in the case of marginalized groups: research suggests that up to half of persons with cognitive disabilities experience loneliness, despite their emancipation after the 1960s. Attempts to reduce their loneliness have only limited success, because we do not fully understand why people with cognitive disabilities experience more loneliness than the general population. What academic research in particular lacks are studies about interpersonal (dis)connections between people with and without cognitive disabilities over a longer period of time and in different places in the world.
The challenge of writing the history of interpersonal connections will be faced by the transnational moral history of friendships between people with and without cognitive disabilities this project entails to write. DisFriend will follow and contextualize how influential international organizations and communities in which people with and without disabilities have lived and worked together in countries all over the world, constructed, practiced and strived for friendship as a “moral good” since the 1960s. By investigating friendship (or a lack of friendship) in five historical case studies, DisFriend will provide a better understanding of why people with cognitive disabilities have experienced more loneliness despite they have been increasingly recognized as fellow citizens.
By analyzing under-investigated archival data, published stories, and by conducting oral history interviews, DisFriend will enrich historiography with the history of overlooked but influential counter-hegemonic internationalisms and a rewriting of the history of community care from the perspective of cognitively disabled people. Moreover, DisFriend’s transnational moral history approach opens a new horizon in research on loneliness of marginalized groups beyond national approaches that only highlight vulnerability
Photo: James C. Svehla / COD Newsroom, via Flickr. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.