At the September 2025 ASTC Conference, the Lived Experience of Disability in Museums Research Group facilitated an interactive workshop on disability employment in museums and science centers, led by disabled museum professionals. Our central premise guiding the workshop is that accessibility in museums must be understood as a labor issue embedded in organizational structures, as well as a visitor-facing concern.
At the session, we invited participants to think about how organizational cultures, labor practices, and leadership structures affect how disabled people can enter and remain in museum work. Disabled people are already part of museum workforces, yet the structures of museum labor are rarely designed with them in mind. This matters because the exclusion of disabled workers actively undermines institutional knowledge, resilience, and the ability of museums to effectively serve their publics. Without addressing employment structures, accessibility efforts are performative, rather than transformative. Rather than present a single idea or solution to inaccessibility, we encouraged participants to reflect on their own institutional contexts and to identify strategies that are adaptable as well as grounded in disabled lived experience.
Our workshop focused on disability employment from the perspective of disabled museum educators, covering the following four main themes:
- Disabled leadership
- Institutional ownership of disability-related initiatives
- Disability employee resource groups
- Intersectional barriers to careers and structural inequality.
These case studies were drawn from our own lived experiences as disabled people in the museum sector in both the United States and United Kingdom.
Disabled Leadership
To discuss disabled leadership, Dr. Morris, an Egyptologist, museum professional, and disability activist, presented a case study focused on how museums can recognize disabled expertise as a valuable source of leadership, and on leadership structures (such as co-leadership) that come from disability activist spheres. Disabled professionals remain underrepresented in leadership roles, even in institutions that prioritize accessibility. Disabled professionals also bring critical insight into access, interpretation, and audience engagement. Yet too often, decision-making power essentially remains elsewhere. Disabled professionals’ contributions are confined to advisory roles, which are often unpaid or underpaid due partially to government restrictions.
In the United States, disabled workers can be paid below minimum wage due to benefit systems that cap income tied to healthcare access in addition to being paid below minimum wage due to their disability type. These are restrictive conditions that institutions may exploit, intentionally or otherwise. The expectation is that disabled people should be content to have employment at all.
These patterns reflect structural failure as well as systemic ableism. In the museum sphere, these patterns result in the devaluation of disabled people, their lived experiences, and their capacity for leadership.
Alexandra F. Morris (she/her) is a white disabled Egyptologist, lecturer, and disability activist tying the past to the present. Her research is on disability in ancient Egypt, the Classical world, and creating inclusive museums. She is the Co-Founder of the Lived Experience of Disability in Museums Research Group. She has cerebral palsy and dyspraxia.
Institutional Memory and the Onus of Accessibility
As presented by Code, a graduate student, we explored how accessibility initiatives are often supported by individuals rather than being embedded into organizational structures. As shared in this case study, when staff members leave or die, initiatives frequently disappear with them. The result is a cycle of reinvention or total erasure, where accessibility work must continually be restarted and no actual long term institutional change takes place. This reflects the lack of institutional commitment and the continued framing of access as an individual issue rather than one that should be addressed collectively across institutions and society.
Code Beschler (he/they) is a white, queer, multiply disabled anthropologist, parent, and disability activist. His research examines how disabled knowledge contributes to culture, community, and care.
Employee Resource Groups
A third case study presented by Emma, examined disability employee resource groups as spaces for mutual support, advocacy, and institutional change. Emma currently works as a Museum Specialist at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, and also serves as secretary for the Disability Employee Resource Group. Also, called DERG, the Disability Employee Resource Group has been a wonderful resource for her and others, as we navigate an especially difficult period for disabled individuals working in the federal government. DERG serves as an internal third party to receive and voice concerns surrounding ableism at the institutions and provide resources and support for staff reporting discrimination.
As Emma shared, there are both advantages and risks associated with these groups, particularly when they are expected to carry the emotional and strategic labor of accessibility without adequate resourcing or authority. The concern is how these internal groups can uplift and prioritize disabled leadership amid federal institutions disbanding groups focused on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), and how these groups can be resources that avoid becoming another way to extract unpaid labor from disabled staff. To be effective, Emma explained, these groups need resources (both financial and institutional), decision-making power and disabled leadership, and effective communication and recognition to challenge entrenched ableism.
Emma Cieslik (she/her) is a white queer, multiply disabled museum worker, activist, and public historian based in the Washington, DC area. Her research explores the intersection of disability, gender and sexuality, and material culture, and she has written about rising ableism, homophobia towards and censorship of federal employees and diverse histories. She is also an audio describer who provides verbal descriptions of visual content for people who are blind or low vision.
Class and Other Intersectionalities
Finally, through a case study presented by Karl, an independent curator, we highlighted how disability intersects with class, race, gender, queerness, and caregiving responsibilities to shape museum careers. Structural barriers such as inflexible work patterns, informal recruitment networks, and assumptions about productivity were identified as key factors which limit retention and advancement. From our discussion we identified some examples of best practice from the audience including reframing job descriptions, embedding inclusivity in job interviews (i.e., sending questions to everyone in advance), and flexible/hybrid working patterns. Participants were encouraged to shift thinking from temporary individual accommodation frameworks towards meaningful structural changes they could make at the institutional level.
Karl Mercer (he/him) is a white, disabled, working-class independent scholar of Ancient History and Classics and self-identified ‘Outsider.’ His Curating Visibility exhibition at Dover Museum—At the End of History—featured a VR piece that may be the first of its kind for visually impaired access.
From Principles to Practice: What Museums Can Do Based on the Workshop
To continue the conversation from our ASTC workshop, we hope to further engage Dimensions readers with practical ideas for museums who acknowledge a need for systemic change around any of these themes. Below, we provide some recommendations on what museums can do that would consider the lived experience of disability in their staff. Following, we provide a list of resources to help any museum professional (disabled and ally) find out what others in the field are doing to enact change as well as learn more about disability history.
Recognize structural institutional and societal biases:
- Audit and re-evaluate collections to illuminate hidden or erased disability narratives
- Audit and re-evaluate language and narratives addressing disability and other marginalized identities in collections and educational programming
Embed accessibility into organizational structures:
- Integrate accessibility into strategy, budgeting, and evaluation from the start of initiatives
- Ensure initiatives are self-sustaining, not dependent on individuals
- Recognize and support disabled leadership
- Recruit and promote disabled professionals into leadership roles
- Rethink leadership models to value collaboration, specifically acknowledging that no one person speaks for the entire disability community or for all disabled museum workers. Everyone brings their own experiences. It’s about uplifting people with diverse experiences to point out how different strategies can fight various systems of oppression, exclusion, and discrimination.
Resource accessibility work properly:
- Compensate accessibility labor
- Fund and empower employee resource groups
Reform employment practices:
- Audit hiring and promotion systems and normalize flexible and accessible working practices
- Require staff training on disability etiquette
As museums respond to staffing pressures and growing expectations for inclusive practice and equity, questions about who can access and lead museum work have become increasingly critical, alongside questions about how employment structures shape inclusion and retention. We welcome inquiries in order to continue this important conversation. Contact Alexandra Morris, PhD, Wade Berger, PhD.
Recommended Resources
Museum Accessibility
Ciaccheri, Maria Chiara. (2022). Museum Accessibility by Design: A Systemic Approach to Organizational Change. London: Bloomsbury/American Alliance of Museums.
Eardley, Alison F. and Vanessa E. Jones (editors). (2025). The Museum Accessibility Spectrum: Re-imagining Access and Inclusion. London: Routledge.
Morris, Alexandra F. and Debby Sneed (2021). “Blog: A Brief Guide to Disability Terminology and Theory in Ancient World Studies,” SCS Blog, https://www.classicalstudies.org/scs-blog/alexandra-morris/blog-brief-guide-disability-terminology-and-theory-ancient-world-studies
Stephens, Simon (editor). (2023). Museums Journal: The Anti-Ableism Issue [Special Issue]. Museums Journal.
Ware, Syrus Marcus, Kate Zankowicz, and Sarah Sims (editors). (2022). The Call for Disability Justice in Museum Education: Re-Framing Accessibility as Anti-Ableism [Special Issue]. Journal of Museum Education 47 (2).
Disability History
Blackie, Daniel. and Alexia Moncrieff. (2022). “State of the Field: Disability History,” History, 107: 789-811. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.13315
Disabled Action Research Kollective (DARK). (2024-2025). Various Zines on Disability History. Free to access here: https://libcom.org/tags/disability-action-research-kollective
Morris, Alexandra F. and Hannah Vogel. (2025). Disability in Ancient Egypt and Egyptology: All Our Yesterdays. London: Routledge.
Morris, Alexandra F. (2025). Disability in Ptolemaic Egypt and the Hellenistic World: Plato’s Stepchildren. London: Routledge.
Nielson, Kim E. (2012). A Disability History of the United States. Beacon Press.
