Students, faculty and staff at Sacramento State have a new resource: The Disability Cultural Center.
It’s the first of its kind in the California State University system, and joins just over 20 similar spaces across the country — including UC Berkeley’s Disability Cultural Community Center, which opened its doors last year. And the center’s creation is emblematic of a growing recognition of ableism — the systemic discrimination and oppression of disabled people — and disability as an identity.
These concepts were understood before the COVID-19 pandemic and have only been accelerated by it. With more COVID infections come more possibility of long COVID, and while that’s not the only cause of increased disability, the reported number of disabled Americans over 16 has grown by over 5 million people since the start of the pandemic. Growing disability means more people are reckoning with what it means to be disabled, and because disability is self-reported, this could still be an undercount.
While the center had its soft opening toward the end of the 2022-2023 school year, this school year it’s fully launching with a sensory room, a gathering space and connections to other resources for disabled students on campuses.
In a 2021 point-in-time count across the CSU system, almost 21,000 students received support from disability services, which UC Davis professor Ryan Lee Cartwright says “are about providing the minimum legal obligations [per the Americans with Disabilities Act].”
“It’s important for there to be other kinds of spaces like cultural centers where students, staff or other folks involved with the university community can connect and advocate in other ways, and just come together around something other than this minimum legal requirement,” he said.
Sacramento State undergraduate Shannon Brown is the office manager for the Disability Cultural Center and said during her first attempt at college, she didn’t have access to disability services or the resources that the center offers.
“I did not make it through the first time around, so it’s lovely to be able to provide the students with the things that a lot of people in our department — because quite a few of us have disabilities — didn’t have access to,” she said.
Spaces like these can’t singlehandedly untangle ableism from campuses and the communities they’re embedded in, but they do provide a stepping stone for conversations and organizing that can, and a respite for disabled students, faculty and staff to come together outside of the language of legality and pathology.
Books are on display at the Disability Cultural Center at CSUS, Thursday, Aug. 17, 2023. Andrew Nixon / CapRadio at the Disability Cultural Center at CSUS, Thursday, Aug. 17, 2023.Andrew Nixon / CapRadio
History of disability cultural centers
Disability cultural centers are intertwined with the fight for disability rights, on which universities and colleges have often been a battleground.
In the late 1960s, 12 quadriplegic UC Berkeley students — known as the Rolling Quads — protested the California Department of Rehabilitation’s threat to evict two of their own from the Cowell Residence Program. Their advocacy expanded to a movement centered around giving disabled students control over their lives and education, and helped usher in conversations about ableism and disability rights on a national level.
When the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed in 1990, disabled students at the University of Minnesota founded the Disabled Students Cultural Center the following year. Still, it took another twenty years before similar efforts were successful on other campuses — Syracuse University and the University of Washington.
While future centers emerged shortly after, the process of building them hasn’t necessarily been quick. Years of town halls and work by disabled students went into UC Berkeley’s Disability Cultural Community Center before it opened in October 2022.
In that way, Sacramento State’s Disability Cultural Center is distinct from most others like it: The actual work of moving everything into the space and getting it ready for the soft opening took less than a year, Brown said.
Still, the center was born out of the same concerns that motivated the creation of similar ones at other universities. It offers a place for disabled people to meet each other and build relationships outside of a doctor’s room or an office focused primarily on figuring out access needs.
Rachel Stewart completed her Ph.D. at Sacramento State, and her dissertation focused on the disabled student activism behind disability cultural centers. Part of her conclusion included that “personal experiences with ableism, a need to connect with others who can understand these experiences, and a lack of safe spaces to connect to the disability community on campus leads students to engage in activism for DCCs.”
“I do feel like we're kind of riding a tidal wave of recognizing disability in a different way on college campuses,” Stewart said.
The initial request for a center was made by students, but the process of physically building the center was carried out by Student Affairs staff — namely Brown and Mary Lee Vance, who is the director of both the Disability Cultural Center and the Disability Access Center, which works with students to meet their access needs for classes.
Vance said “students [were] expressing a desire for having a place that they could call their own, that would be safe,” one like the Serna Center, the MLK Center or the Sac State PRIDE Center.
“We also knew that students just needed a place to know that, when they go into it, that they can immediately jump from [thinking] ‘I have a disability’ internally to knowing that someone else in the room is either someone that also has a disability, and/or is an ally, which is the only space on campus where students can do that,” Vance said. “On campus, you'll see other students, but you don't know that there is that point of commonality.”
Students had the opportunity to share what they wanted the space to look like through writing their input on a bulletin board in the Assistive Technology Lab, located in the Academic Information Research Center. The lab also shares physical space with the cultural center — when the idea of a disability cultural center came up pre-pandemic, there wasn’t a physical space for one.
But when the pandemic prompted Sacramento State to start a laptop loan program, space in the Assistive Technology Lab opened up. And that extra room helped make the Disability Cultural Center, which Brown said is “still a work-in-progress,” a reality.
“Although we didn't have funding available to decorate anything, we really wanted to at least get the space started and make it usable,” she said. “We hit up Freecycle boards, we hit up local community groups and decked the place out as best we could to make sure that it was functional, had lots of seating, that it was cozy and comfortable.”
What the center provides
The center has a burgeoning library with books on disability, board games that are accessible across different disabilities like Uno cards for sighted and non-sighted people, big cards for people with fine motor issues and more. It has a variety of furniture, which can be arranged for the center to function in different ways — as a social space or a lecture area.
A Braille UNO deck helps student with visual impairments unwind at the Disability Cultural Center at CSUS, Thursday, Aug. 17, 2023.Andrew Nixon / CapRadio
Because it’s connected to the Assistive Technology Lab, there are also a number of computers equipped with varied capabilities like screen reader technology, text-to-speech, speech-to-text and large text.
But what Brown, who is neurodivergent, said she’s most excited about is the center’s sensory room, which it received a grant to help furnish and stock.
“If you go to the union, they have a relaxation room — it is geared towards our neurotypical student population, and they need certain things for the software that their brains run to relax,” she said. “Our neurodivergent population needs different things for their brains to relax, and we're so excited to be able to provide those things for them here.”
Stimming, or self-stimulating behavior, involves repetitive actions, like repeating words or phrases, tapping fingers or feet and rearranging objects. And the dimly lit sensory room, which is designed for a single person to use, with some space for a friend, is meant to be a space where people can self-regulate without being watched.
The room is soundproofed for those who need to verbally stim. It’s stocked with a variety of items someone can use to self-regulate: Noise-canceling headphones and earbuds, weighted blankets, fidget items, visual stimulation devices like lava lamps and yoga mats and exercise bands, among other things.
“You can close that door and have that quiet to help bring your brain to where you need it to be,” Brown said.
Vance said she leaned on other contacts to help develop the center, and specifically talked with folks running the University of Tennessee’s MOSAIC program, which has been running since 2008 and supports autistic students working toward degrees.
She’s hopeful that the center will not only provide space for disabled people to find respite, build community and share resources with each other, but that it’s a starting point for conversations about disability history, disability identity and disability pride.
“Disability intersects all identities, all races, all ages, all economic brackets,” Vance said.
Sacramento State professor of social work Katie Savin began teaching at the university this year and has only been to the Disability Cultural Center once, but they said its presence on campus already means a lot.
“Just as an individual coming into this institution, being able to know there's a place I belong feels deeply soothing to me,” they said. “I want my students who are disabled to feel that there's a place where they belong, and they're celebrated for who they are.”
While Brown and Vance are the center’s primary employees currently, they’re looking to hire another student employee to help with getting the word out, along with programming events that draw people to the space and respond to Hornet community needs.
“It’s kind of like … the Field of Dreams,” Vance said. “You know, you build it and they'll come, and that's what my expectation is, is that will happen.”
Broadening conversations
One of the limitations to students accessing the center is that they may not necessarily see themselves as having a disability.
“The disability identity is not really known, it’s not really publicly acknowledged as being okay to have,” Vance said.
Buttons for the taking are arranged on a corkboard near the entryway to the center and identify a range of disabilities. It’s one of the ways the center aims to encourage students to develop a sense of disability identity and pride.
Buttons are available at the Disability Cultural Center at CSUS, Thursday, Aug. 17, 2023.Andrew Nixon / CapRadio
While the campaign was in honor of Disability Pride Month in July, “of course, disability is all-year round … but we’re always happy to raise awareness,” said Brown, the undergraduate student and office manager for the Disability Cultural Center.
“What we’ve been telling people is that you don’t need to be part of our program to get a button,” she said. “But if you do see your diagnosis on a button, you might want to talk to us about services.”
And wide-scale disability pride celebrations are still relatively new — the first Disability Pride Day happened in Boston after the ADA passed in July 1990, with the first Disability Pride Month recognized on the civil rights legislation’s 25th anniversary in July 2015.
“Disability pride can be really important,” said Cartwright, the UC Davis professor. “There’s a famous poem by a queer disabled activist named Laura Hershey that is quoted a lot — ”You Get Proud by Practicing” — and learning how to cast off shame around disability and … to understand ableism as a social force of oppression is and can be really important to disability movements generally.”
Cartwright’s research and book, “Peculiar Places,” chronicle the stories of people who may not have identified as disabled or claimed disability pride, but had the experience of disability and were considered disabled by others.
He said that disability as an identity — and one to take pride in — “comes about from the idea that disability … is not an individual flaw, but rather that what creates the experience of disability is social exclusion on the basis of differences in people’s bodies and minds.”
“In other words, how people are excluded from society on the basis of how their bodies and minds differ from what that society expects and requires,” he said. “Disability pride comes from that idea — because if you understand disability as a form of social oppression, then you can organize around that to create change rather than feeling the shame or stigma of something that is always framed as a defect or a flaw or something negative and individual.”
Because disability pride is so closely tied to individual acceptance, it’s also messy — not always as neat as a button popped on a backpack or fixed to a coat.
“Just because a person doesn’t claim disability identity or disability pride doesn’t necessarily mean that they believe in the medical model of disability, that disability is something to be ashamed of or an individual flaw,” Cartwright said.
And disabled cultural centers can feel “more or less accessible,” depending on people’s individual experiences — from how they become disabled to how disability is discussed in different communities.
“I think that is also the work of this center, having events that are co-sponsored with other groups, and not having too much of a focus only on pride,” Savin, the Sacramento State professor, said. “For … the people who’ve become disabled through violence, a lot of people’s disability relates to oppression in some form in terms of its origin. There’s absolutely a lot of work to do to make it a space that people feel like they might fit into.”
Still, they said the space is one of possibility — for disabled faculty and staff to connect with disabled students of all levels outside of hierarchies, for sharing resources, for gathering together. And for moving past individual empowerment against ableism toward collective struggle, resistance and growth in the spirit of disability justice, a framework distinct from disability rights advocacy.
“I think it [the center] also needs to be a portal to the disability community in Sacramento more broadly,” they said. “One really important role of an anchor university and a disability cultural center is to center activists and people directly implicated by disability justice in their programming, to bring together people doing research with activists.”
The center is open Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. in AIRC Room 2011 on the Sacramento State campus.
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