By: Sophia da Silva 🇧🇷
The cultural centers will be built at The William P. Cole, Jr. Student Activities Building. (Ashly Cifuentes)
Earlier this year construction on five new campus cultural centers began in the Cole Student Activities building. This month, the University welcomed the lead coordinator for the disability cultural center: Dr. Sara Acevedo.
Acevedo is a long time disability educator, scholar and activist with more than 10 years of faculty experience across several universities. The Disability Cultural Center will be her first student affairs role.
“It’s care work,” said Acevedo about the center, “...forming networks of care across campus and beyond campus.”
Acevedo spoke about universities representing only a microcosm of what happens in the world. Spaces like these have the ability to nurture not only community but student leadership opportunities. Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Yvette Lerma Jones, echoed these ideas when sharing the mission for the Cultural Center project as a whole.
“Honoring the work of these communities and what they’ve done on our campus but also offering a start to a new era in this work and an era of growth and fruition for a lot of these communities in a different way,” said Lerma Jones.
Acevedo hopes to move the campus’s understanding of justice beyond inclusion to access and defining what real access means.
“Access to our own cultural histories, our own forms of cultural practice, our own ways of self representation, performance, art, scholarship even. And to our own body-mind autonomy, decision making power.” said Acevedo.
Acevedo explained that what is often missing from discussions on inclusion is the idea that there was, at some point, an excluded group, and that society was designed to exclude disabled people. She elaborated on this point using an analogy of society as a Jenga tower; where to fit into the existing structure any differently shaped peg must be cut or sanded down.
“They would be permanently different within that structure. They would not properly assimilate even if they have been included, because they’ve been included within a structure that was made without those pegs in mind,” said Acevedo.
Acevedo talked about how the experiences of disabled people are often mediated by outside forces, whether it be caretakers, doctors or any others speaking on their behalf. The heart of Acevedo’s vision for disability culture on campus is for disabled students to lead their own initiatives.
“I hope that the cultural center is a space, a harbor, a hub for many different forms of thinking about disability and organizing around disability,” said Acevedo.
From non-disabled people Acevedo asks for political companionship. Acevedo alludes to the neo-Zapatista movement – a grassroots political effort for Indigenous Mexican liberation – and asks that we all “lead by obeying.”
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