The film was co-created with a team of researchers from the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries and the National Trust, alongside myself and filmmakers Belle Vue Productions. Deaf-led organisation Remark! supported with British Sign Language and accessibility.

Everywhere and Nowhere is a research collaboration between the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries at the University of Leicester and the National Trust. It explores little known and previously untold histories of disability from across Trust sites and collections. Our approach places experience and expertise around disability at the heart of a collaborative research process to investigate how stories related to the lives of disabled people in the past can be ethically researched and presented in new ways.

​The aim is to build and share richer and fuller histories about the Trust’s sites, their collections and the people who lived and worked there; by highlighting gaps and omissions, we raise questions about the stories cultural institutions choose to tell and those they overlook or choose to silence.

​Researching disability history is a complex endeavour. For a whole range of reasons we very often know less about the lives of disabled people in the past than we do about non-disabled people. Negative and stigmatising attitudes can mean that our archives are partial and it can be difficult, but not impossible, to build a full picture of both the lives of disabled people – in their own words – and the social norms and attitudes that shaped their experience. Contemporary attitudes towards disability also play a part in obscuring or distorting the past. Historic connections to disability may be viewed as unimportant or omitted for fear of causing offense. Disabled people from the past are often presented in narrow, reductive and dehumanising ways or through the use of persistent and commonplace negative stereotypes. A fresh look at historical records can sometimes reveal those same lives filled with opportunity and autonomy, influence and adventure, love and joy.

​In the absence of information about the lives of disabled people in the past, there is a risk that cultural institutions can present objects and stories in ways that erase disabled histories or reproduce untruths and are harmful to the lives of disabled people today; leaving little room for empathy, understanding or human connection.

​Everywhere and Nowhere aims to tell stories linked to disability in ways that are as respectful and ethical as they are engaging and enlightening. Developed with disabled collaborators and experts in disability history, our research to date suggests that to disability are indeed everywhere, threaded through our heritage buildings and landscapes, the lives, collections and historical records attached to them. The stories we share through Everywhere and Nowhere begin to address long standing omissions, drawing disabled lives and experiences into view.