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Content warning: This piece includes mentions of ableism and derogatory terms for disabled people.
If you’ve been involved with the UQ Union at all, you may have heard of the UQU Disability Collective. As stated on the Union’s website, the collective is a branch of the union, ‘concerned with the advocacy, support and social connectedness of students at UQ who experience disability, chronic illness, mental illness, neurodiversity and/or are Deaf’.
Both of us are current members and were previously Disability Officers (Siân in 2023, and Sophy in 2024), elected to represent disabled students at UQ. Since its beginnings as a grassroots initiative in 2013, with our knowledge of the collective and the help of a few past and present members, we figured it was time to shine a light on some of the group’s history.
Who are DisCo?
The UQU Disability Collective, colloquially known as DisCo (Disability Collective) and formerly known as the Abilities Collective, serves as a community group on campus for disabled students. It provides a social and community space for those who have the shared experience of disability. Being such a unique experience, disability can be isolating, and despite the diversity within the community, having a group of people who even somewhat understand your lived experience cannot be understated. Making social connections with those who can accept your needs without complex explanations is such a freeing experience. Significantly though, a disability collective allows members to exchange knowledge of navigating a world that so often is just not designed for them. It allows that collective and generational knowledge to be passed down to those who could be just starting out in the world of disability. A community group like this does not just exist on its own; it is cared for, supported, and maintained by the disability officers, an executive committee, all participating members, the broader union, and every person or organisation who has helped to uplift it.
The origin story
In researching for this article, we were lucky enough to find ourselves with access to many of the past minutes from the collective’s formal meetings. This helped us put together an idea of the initiatives the collective had run over the years and the ways they organised as a group. However, what these limited, formal recordings couldn’t tell us is the stories of the initial members, and why the collective really came to be in the first place.
In mid-June, Siân sat down with Kate Watson, the founder of ‘Able @ UQ’, which was an informal social group for students and a precursor to the disability collective that we know today. A flyer from 2013 described it as:
“…for students of UQ St Lucia who are not always able to use their bodies or minds in the way that most people usually can. We are a small, but growing group that aims to provide social support and friendship to one another via our Facebook group and through regular social events.”
When Kate started studying psychology at UQ in 2012, she was excited to learn about the union’s Women’s and Queer collectives, which both had existing spaces on campus for their members. These were and continue to be used for a range of purposes that benefit students, from serving as a space to relax and socialise, as safe spaces to avoid discrimination and harassment, and a location for regular meetings or community organising.
Based on the rules of the Women’s and Queer Collectives, she was automatically a member and permitted to access those spaces. There was a problem, though. The spaces didn’t offer the kinds of support she needed as someone with chronic health issues and associated fatigue. What’s more, they weren’t exactly inclusive when it came to disability. The spaces were located upstairs and initially had no lift access for students. They were not accessible to all members.
Frustrated by the lack of access and inclusion, Kate began to wonder why there wasn’t a group for students with disabilities.
“…that was the first thing that made me go, ‘Well, why isn’t there?’ I’m sure there are other people like me on campus, who can relate to the… exponential barriers that we face when we’re dealing with chronic health or disability.”
In this way, the founding of Able @ UQ and subsequently the Disability Collective occurred as a direct response to the lack of accessibility in both the union spaces as well as the university at the time. It was also an endeavour to foster community by bringing together students who were otherwise lacking opportunities for social support and connection that not only acknowledged their experiences also but embraced them.
After a successful first year as an unofficial club of sorts, in 2014, Able @ UQ became affiliated with the UQ Union as a collective, rebranding into ‘UQU Abilities Collective’. They adopted a new logo and the colour burgundy in their rebrand, which is the awareness ribbon colour for adults with disability.
One of Kate’s greatest achievements during her time with the collective was helping to secure a room on campus for members. A community centre of sorts. It offers a central place with a degree of resourcing, and has been invaluable in bringing people together socially, whilst also offering a safe space for disabled students to get away from the bustle of campus life and take care of medical needs with some dignity and privacy.
From ‘abilities’ to ‘disability collective’
As the disability rights and justice movements have evolved over the years, so has the language used to describe disability. Words such as ‘handicap’, ‘lame’, ‘dumb’, ‘invalid’ or ‘r*tard’ were once more common, but as we’ve become more aware of the problematic history of some words and as cultural shifts arise in the way we view disability, some of these terms have come to be viewed as slurs. Many in the community currently prefer the term ‘disabled’, and this is evidently where the Disability Collective stands today, even selling button badges featuring the slogan ‘Disabled isn’t a dirty word!’.
The original logo of the Abilities Collective also needed some updating. Originally, puzzle pieces were a key feature of the design, but they are a symbolism unfortunately tied to the highly controversial organisation, Autism Speaks. Many Autistic-led advocacy groups report that the organisation promotes prejudice against autistic people, with the use of puzzle-piece imagery suggesting they need to be “fixed”, are puzzling, or are even “missing a piece”.
Members wanted change, and by the end of 2021, the Disability Collective had officially shed its old name, and the logo was changed through a reiterative feedback process with members, to the minimalist, monogram design it uses today.
An evolving purpose
Disability issues are broad, and the needs of the community are diverse. When it first began, the group’s focus was on connection, bringing together people with similar experiences. First, taking the time to build community would be essential to the collective’s future. Fostering community is critical to being able to take action as a group, but despite the great need for student-led disability advocacy, disabled students are often faced with greater challenges to organising.
For starters, despite other student representative roles within the union being paid, Disability Officers weren’t for the majority of its brief history, and there were significant hurdles and opposition to the positions becoming paid. Disabled people are disproportionately low- income, experience higher rates of poverty, and typically have higher basic living expenses. The roles of the two elected officers in running the collective were a huge task. Since the positions became paid in 2022 (at least partially), we have seen an increase in the number of actively involved members, the number of events each year, greater community support, and a flourishing in the initiatives the collective organises.
One supposed shortfall of the collective to outsiders might be that it tends to move at a slower pace in the realms of advocacy and activism. Rather than a failing, we view this more as a feature of a group that is concurrently functioning on crip time — a concept arising from how disabled people experience time differently to non-disabled folks. As disability writer and scholar, Ellen Samuels describes it in her essay ‘Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time’: crip time is time travel.
“When disabled folks talk about crip time, sometimes we just mean that we’re late all the time—maybe because we need more sleep than nondisabled people, maybe because the accessible gate in the train station was locked. But other times, when we talk about crip time, we mean something more beautiful and forgiving. We mean, as my friend Margaret Price explains, we live our lives with a “flexible approach to normative time frames” like work schedules, deadlines, or even just waking and sleeping.”
Some wins are bigger than others, but they all help towards making life better for disabled students. Over the years, members of the collective have become more active in attending various university committees to be a voice for disabled students, working together to change inaccessible or ableist systems and practices. An example of this from 2022 was the mandating of transcripts and captions on all recorded content. The policy, which was particularly beneficial for those who are d/Deaf, hard of hearing, or have processing issues, was successfully passed through the UQ Senate. Where more individual support is needed, the collective has served as a connector, linking students to the union’s Student Advocacy and Support team, who help students through the process of filing complaints or grievances with the university.
In more recent history…
DisCo’s history has so far been a short but impactful one. To the broader university community, DisCo is known for its awareness stalls, subsidised Auslan (Australian Sign Language) classes, and collaboration with UQ’s Neurodivergent Hub. Within the DisCo community, they are known for their in-person and online spaces that have allowed members to socialise in addition to sharing stories and advice. There have been a number of notable achievements that members can be proud of, from publishing a book entirely by disabled students to co-creating a survey that investigated the experiences of disabled university students, which resulted in a detailed report that was submitted to the Disability Royal Commission. Acknowledging the intersectionality in disability, they have also strengthened their collaborations with other Union Collectives. Whilst the road has sometimes been bumpy, the collective has continued to grow, and as students graduate and leave, new ones become involved, building on the legacy left to them.
Written by Siân Chadfield and Sophy Barlow
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