ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Designing Prosthetics of Productivity: Disabled Ex-servicemen, Scientific Management, and the British Post Office, 1918-1921

• In Event: Disability's Conscription in British History

English Abstract

This paper investigates the design of occupational prosthetics—technologies created by and for disabled employees to carry out tasks in their employment. Tracing the design and deployment of occupational prosthetics within the British Post Office suggests that cultures of scientific management were not strictly imposed by institutions in the traditional top-down manner anticipated in disability histories of labour. I explore the ways in which theories of industrial productivity and scientific management fused with disability design, establishing the Post Office as a nexus of institutional collaboration between disabled and able-bodied employees. The designs, and resulting artefacts, reveal the active agency of postal workers throughout the development of occupational prosthetics. The designers were not professional craftsmen, orthopaedic experts, or artisans familiar with the corporeal mechanisation of limbs, but were disabled or lay experts, who produced bespoke designs based on their embodied knowledge of both their disabilities and of work in the postal service. Institutions have often been represented by disability historians—understandably—as spaces of trauma and oppression. However, this paper shows how historians can look beyond narratives of institutional exploitation by reconstructing the labour of disabled innovators. Though institutions can act as sites of exclusion for marginalised groups, they also possess rich archival material that can help us to recover the experiences of disabled people in Britain.

Author

• Lucy Anne Jameson