January 26, 2001

The FDR Memorial: Who Speaks From the Wheelchair?

By Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

As public spaces transformed into collective stories, memorials are inherently controversial. Didactic narratives about who we are and what we believe, they span generations and vast differences in hu-man perceptions, bringing to light all sorts of divisions in the national "we." One of those divides has occurred between a group of scholars in disability studies and the designers of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington. The five-year struggle over the collective story told by

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