ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the importance of doing microhistory approach when looking at the lives of disabled individuals and serves to contextualise the chapters to follow in this section. Micro historians emphasize the importance of placing small units of research within larger contexts. Instead, this chapter will consider whether this research focus excludes historical inquiry that has its focus on only one person, only one story. This scholarly research model provides the opportunity to slow down the research process, to examine each fragment of knowledge, and place it in the context of other knowledge possessed by the researcher. The basis of the slow ideology is precisely the opposite of this: not to seek to smooth out people's rough surfaces, but to find opportunities to demonstrate the positive side of the fact that not everything, and everyone, is the same.
