Why UConn needs a disability cultural center

Recently, the Center for Students with Disabilities (CSD) sent a survey to their clients by sixth-semester social work and sociology student Mia Giancola gauging for the interest of a disability cultural center on the Storrs campus. This proposition has been a long time coming. Disabled students tend to feel silenced, invisible and largely unaccounted for on campus. For these students to feel more supported and comfortable on campus, the Board of Trustees must listen to Giancola’s advocacy for the disabled UConn community with the first step of establishing a disability cultural center at their meeting on Wednesday, Feb. 25. 
 
Let’s define disability briefly before we continue this dialogue. As there are legal, social and medical definitions of disability, combining these perspectives is important as none of them exist in a vacuum. Disability is an umbrella term covering a wide range of physical and mental conditions that are viewed as impairing to the person and their ability to navigate through activities in society according to the Center for Disease Control. This includes aspects such as mobility, sensing, cognition, emotional, biological and chronic conditions. Disability can fundamentally influence your worldview as a result, making it a cultural identity instead of only just a diagnosis. 
 
Disabled people are taught to internalize ableism and think they’re the problem explicitly and implicitly. They are taught not to accept these parts of their identities but rather to loathe themselves based on how the world treats them. As disability is more than just diagnoses but rather identities and cultures with a rich history of resistance and advocacy via activist movements and self-expression, it would be in UConn’s best interest to listen to the push led by disabled UConn students to establish a disability cultural center to ensure that support for disabled students doesn’t end with accessibility support and other accommodations. 
 
Why do these misconceptions about disabled people persist? It all begins with ignorance snowballing into forms of bigotry. To understand this, we need a critical and intersectional lens, as identities do not exist in isolationand run concurrently to each other. We’ve seen bigoted ideologies towards other marginalized identities — such as in race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and religion — in their general goals to be treated with equality, equityand the pursuit of mutual understanding. Cultural centers have been proven to build communities to combat this pervasive bigotry with immersive cultural celebration and education.

As such, a disability cultural center would help fight misconceptions, discrimination and general ignorance about disability culture as proven with previous cultural centers. This institutional affirmation would be anotherstep in the mission for disability advocacy and equity, giving important resources that demonstrate the importance of the social lives and cultures of disabled UConn students.  
 
CSD offers a different sort of support for UConn students. They provide accommodations but aren’t primarily engineered for building a disabled community culture. They support students in different ways from the cultural center structure of providing comfortable socializing space for UConn students centered about education. A disability cultural center would also be crucial for the success of disabled students for social advocacy and community-building instead of solely accommodations that help with mobility and learning.  
 
Having a social life is evidently important to college students and disabled students aren’t exempted from this. A disability cultural center would be integral for disabled students to be motivated to finish their degrees while fighting ableism with a support system they know they can rely on and advocate for them. They can also celebrate a culture they can associate with instead of feeling ashamed. This would help everyone through furtherensuring inclusivity on campus and providing programming geared for educating on disability culture. 
 
There have been other Disability Cultural Centers established across the country that are still operating to this day and serving the social needs of disabled students. This is a tried-and-true structure that has already made positive impacts on disabled students at the locations they are available. This is not a new movement, but a movement in dire need of being understood, supported and seen as a culture that one should be proud of. 
 
Disability isn’t the only thing that defines the disabled. It plays a role in their worldview and is part of their identity, but they are also more than this single factor. As disabled students have experienced ableism anywhere but even at UConn in overt and covert ways, a great first step for administration to do to meet the social needs of disabled people is to bring a disability cultural center to the Storrs campus and hopefully inspire more of these across the state and country in the future to give disabled college students spaces that affirm these aspects of their identity and keep improving themselves not only as students but also full human beings.