The Disabled Student’s Network is a campus organization that serves to provide a community for disabled students at Brandeis and promote advocacy and activism for representation for the disabled. The founders of the club are students Luca Swinford ’22 and Zoe Pringle ’22, and the club hosts multiple weekly meetings in-person and over Zoom.
On Wednesdays at 8 p.m., the club holds community meetings in Heller G55 or over Zoom and every other Thursday, the club holds meetings regarding advocacy and activism. This allows the club to support both students who are looking for a community as well as students who want to focus on activism.
Some of the club’s current initiatives include hosting a webinar panel discussing current findings in public health and disabilities. The main focus of the webinar will be to discuss recent COVID-19 policies and their effect on the disabled as well as the relationship between public health policies and the disabled community, according to the BrandeisNOW article. Monika Mitra, the Nancy Lurie Marks Associate Professor of Disability Policy from the Heller School of Management and Stephen Gulley, a lecturer in the Health, Science, Society and Policy (HSSP) department and a current health and disability researcher will serve as guest speakers to provide insight on the focal topics of the webinar. The virtual panel will be held on Friday, March 18 at 2:00 p.m. Any Brandeis community member can register for the event.
The club originally came to be in April 2021. According to a recent BrandeisNow article covering this club, co-founder Swinford was inspired to initiate this club after taking the course HSSP 128A: Disability Policy with Mitra and with his other co-founder Pringle. After observing that there was no organized group for disabled students on campus, the team decided to start one, according to the BrandeisNOW article. While the shift to remote learning had postponed some of their plans and had shifted in-person meetings to virtual meetings, the two founders were determined to move forward, according to the article.
Another inspiration for the club was from the disability activism group Sins Invalid, which serves to celebrate and recognize the diversity of the disabled community. The article described that Sins Invalid recognizes “many disability communities are dominated by white, physically disabled people, which can create a sense of exclusion for those who aren’t white, cisgendered, heterosexual, or those whose disabilities are not physical.”
The article imparts the goals of the founders: “The planners hope to send the message that public health needs to be inclusive to everyone. Both the disabled community and the non-disabled community need to come together to stand against ableism.”
