Scholastic Magazine University of Notre Dame's Student Magazine since 1867

Mike Rooney

What does it mean to have a disability within a college environment? This question is precisely the issue that was addressed at the Disabilities Studies Forum on October 2 and 3. Open to Notre Dame students, faculty and administrators, the event covered a range of topics related to disabilities spanning from adaptive technology to medieval Spanish literature.

Professor Michael Rembis, the director of the Disabilities Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona, gave the two-day presentation. He discussed the rising interest in physical and mental disabilities studies as a discipline. He targeted this study’s importance and its effect on the student body thanks to a grant that was acquired by Professor Essaka Joshua, the director of the Disability Studies Forum.

Joshua, who teaches a college seminar that centers on disabilities, shows her students how disabled people have a very complex and varied personal identity. She hopes to continue this forum into a more definite initiative after the grant has ended in order to increase awareness, but for the remainder of this year she is holding a program of papers. “The Disabilities Studies Forum is important to me because it often enables me to carry my teaching and research interests into a real-world setting,” Joshua says. She says she feels that these forums will provide the Notre Dame community with a better understanding of and respect for disabled people.