With the help of students Camryn Joseph '25 and Isabelle Aquino '24, Apgar launched the Parental "Special Needs" Memoirs Notion Database, allowing visitors to filter stories by age, gender, diagnosis, location, and more.
Over the course of researching her book The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future, Amanda Apgar, associate professor of women’s and gender studies, compiled a large database of memoirs written by parents of disabled children. Originally, Apgar meant to keep the database just for her personal research use. However, after a conversation with her research assistant Isabelle Aquino ‘24, Apgar decided to undertake the process of making the database public.
With the help of Aquino and another research assistant Camryn Joseph ‘25, Apgar began working on making a public database in Notion. The database now contains over 500 different titles that can be sorted by topics such as age, diagnosis, child age range, and more.
