Colin Kohrs / Winonan
Raising awareness for disability on campus at Winona State University is just one of the goals of the Disability Culture Celebration art show, hosted by Kelley Herold’s disability communication and culture course from 6 to 9 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 15.
“Anywhere between as low as 300 to about 700 students here at Winona State University will have a visible disability or an invisible disability,” Herold, an associate professor of communication studies, said. “About 10 percent of any campus is people with disabilities.”
And not all of those people are readily apparent to the general public.
“Even if it’s not a visible thing or a physical thing, it’s all around us,” Sally Golla, a public relations student in Herold’s disability communication and culture course, said.
The art show gallery, which will be displayed in the Student Activity Center, will feature artwork exclusively by artists with disabilities.
“Sometimes people with disabilities have a hard time communicating with words,” Golla said, “So through art there have been a lot of people who have done really cool things. And it’s just an easy way for them to have a good time and show what’s going on in their heads.”
Art as a media also provides a celebration of difference, Herold added.
“Many cultures, be it the African American culture or Latino or any other culture that’s been oppressed by the dominant culture, eventually has some politics that pushes back towards the dominant culture,” Herold said. “It’s through those politics, social movements, hunger strikes or other things like that, you bring attention to the inequities of the dominant culture and the other culture.”
Herold added how once the inequities are addressed, they are then celebrated. This is something that has been happening within the last 20-30 years with disability culture featured throughout different types of art.
In addition to the art show, many students in Herold’s course are organizing to lobby for a change in the location of Winona State’s Access Services for students with disabilities, which is currently located on third floor Maxwell.
“(We) are going to be talking to the university president about moving it to a main floor and maybe more centralized when the space becomes available,” Kathryn Oakland, a communication studies major with an emphasis on leadership and advocacy, said.
Oakland added that while the location of the services may not physically inhibit students from accessing them, the nature of its placement does not necessarily reflect positively on the services. Several other students in the course explained that until the issues were brought up in the course they knew little to nothing about Access Services or its location.
“Being that it’s on third floor, part of it is just the symbol of it,” Oakland said. “The fact that it is just kind of pushed off to the side is kind of like they’re hiding, it whereas if it was more centralized, students with disabilities could feel more included in the rest of campus, instead of having to go way off.”
-By Colin Kohrs