2025 Disability Summit

2025 Disability Summit

Please join us for MSU’s 2^nd Annual Disability Summit on Friday, October 3, 2025, at the Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center. This year’s summit will be a half-day event featuring keynote speaker, disability advocate, and author Haben Girma, networking opportunities, poster presentations and more. Two hundred copies of Haben Girma’s book, Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, will be available to attendees on a first-come, first-served basis, with a book signing opportunity.  

In addition to this year’s in person event on October 3rd, there will be virtual sessions held on Fridays throughout the month of October to honor MSU Disability Pride Month and keep the conversations going.

Registration opens at 8:00 a.m. on Wednesday, September 3, 2025.  You can register for webinars up to 8:00 a.m. on the day of the presentations.  Links to the Friday webinars are located in the description of each webinar.

We will post recordings of some of the webinars in November.

 

• Schedule of Events

  The 2025 Disability Summit will be held on Friday, October 3, 2025 at the Kellogg Hotel & Convention Center from 8:30 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.

  • 8:30 a.m.    Registration table opens
  • 9:00 a.m.    Introductions
  • 9:15 a.m.     Keynote Speaker- Haben Girma
  • 10:15 a.m.    Book Signing

  *The first 200 people to check in at the Registration table will receive a free copy of Haben Girma's book Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law.  

  Coffee & Tea will be served.

• Location/Parking

  The Summit will be held at the Kellogg Conference Center located at 219 S Harrison Rd, East Lansing, MI 48824.

  Parking is included for this event.  If you have a staff permit, you can park in the Kellogg structure.  If you do not have an employee permit, please indicate on your registration and we will send you a validation code before the event if needed.

• Accommodations

  There will be Communication Access in Real-Time (CART) captioning and American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters.   When you register, please list any accommodations you may need.

  Coffee & Tea will be available.

• Registration

  Registration opens at 8:00 a.m. on Wednesday, September 3, 2025.  We will open a waiting list for our Keynote Speaker event at the Kellogg Hotel & Convention Center from 8:30 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. when we reach capacity.  

  You can register for webinars anytime up to 8:00 a.m. on the day of the webinar(s).

• Friday Webinar Series

  In addition to this year’s in person event on October 3, there will be virtual sessions held on Fridays throughout the month of October to honor MSU Disability Pride Month and keep the conversations going.  You can register for webinars up to 8:00 a.m. on the day of the presentations.

  October 3, 2025

  1:00 - 1:50 pm - Intersections of Disability and Healthcare Environments   Zoom Webinar Panelists from the College of Human Medicine will explore the complex intersections of disability and healthcare environments. Ariel Cascio will present research at the nexus of disability studies, neurodiversity, and medical education. Karen Stanley-Kime will address the inclusion and belonging of medical students with physical and mental health disabilities. Amy Greenberg will share systematic approaches to designing accessible medical curricula. Heather Laird Fick will examine the lived experiences of students and physicians with disabilities across the continuum of medical education and practice. Together, the panel offers insights into creating more inclusive, equitable environments in medical training and healthcare.

  2:00 - 2:50 pm - Improving Digital Course Accessibility: Insights from Instructors and Designers  Zoom Webinar  This panel presentation brings together instructors and instructional designers to explore digital course accessibility through institutional data and practical teaching experiences. Participants will examine key findings from the Spartan Ally institutional report to identify common accessibility barriers in digital learning environments. Panelists will share real-world challenges and effective strategies for creating more accessible courses. Attendees will engage in individual reflection to consider how these strategies apply to their own teaching and will be invited to share their ideas with the group. The session supports collective progress toward inclusive learning by highlighting achievable steps that promote access and belonging for all students.

  3:00 - 3:50 pm- University World Language Instructors' Readiness for Disability Inclusion  Zoom Webinar Some disabled students incur challenges when learning second or additional languages and report that instructors play a critical role in their inclusion (Scott et al, 2014) in university language classes. I examined ten university language instructors’ readiness for disability inclusion through a critical disabilities studies framework. Instructors shared they do not feel they are ready to meet the varied needs of their disabled students. They report that degrees of readiness come via either personal exposure to disability (e.g., in their family) or from ad hoc experience trying to meet students’ accommodations needs, rather than from institutional training.

  October 10, 2025

  10:00 - 10:50 am - Digital Accessibility Tips  Join the MSU Digital Accessibility Team as they discuss the easiest ways to make digital accessibility part of your normal authoring and editing process. Ask the team questions and participate in a fun, informal panel of speakers. Come ready to engage!

  11:00 - 11:50 am- (Two flash presentations) Inclusive Labs, Safer Students  

  For students with disabilities, accommodations are a critical tool for laboratory safety.  This process can be daunting for instructors, and we are here to help.  EHS recently worked STEM facility staff to improve classroom laboratory accessibility by installing adjustable-height benches over the summer.  We also partner with RCPD to provide individualized support for these students and their instructors.

  Sensory Experiences at the Libraries  This session will detail MSU Libraries' new sensory room and kits, which were created to support students' sensory needs and experiences and ensure a welcoming and calming environment.   Attendees will be invited and encouraged to share their sensory room and equipment experiences and questions.  

  October 17, 2025

  NEW! 10:00 - 10:50 am - Inclusive Postsecondary Education: "College to Find Jobs"   STRIDE participated in the Community Engaged Research Fellowship 2024-2025 cohort. The research project was to co-design an inclusive postsecondary education (IPSE) program at MSU. Students with intellectual disabilities have limited options when applying for college and many students do not know that they can go to college. To address the gap in disability inclusion and belonging for disabled students with intellectual disabilities, STRIDE implemented community engaged research practices to co-design an IPSE program with a high school student with intellectual disabilities. This presentation includes a Photovoice PowerPoint, and plain language pathways created by the STRIDE IPSE intern.

  11:00 - 11:50 am- Hybrid/Flexible Teaching for Improving Student Experience  This workshop will introduce attendees to developing blended and hybrid/flexible (hyflex) courses. This workshop will 1) outline the impacts of blended teaching and learning as a means of enhancing students' access to classes, 2) explore methods for integrating online and in-person students through activities and discussions, and 3) offer practical insights into structuring and facilitating hyflex classes across various classrooms and technologies.

  12:00 - 12:50 pm- Crip Possibilities: Exploring Affinity Spaces   In this session, participants will explore affinity spaces through an intersectional crip theory lens and co-create ways to establish and preserve affinity spaces in higher education. Affinity spaces are environments where people connect based on similar or shared interests, identities, or experiences. While higher education recognizes the importance of following ADA guidelines, we fail to move beyond these minimum expectations and routinely fail to truly learn from and apply crip wisdom. This session will use disability wisdom to show what we can learn from disabled people and how we can infuse this cultural knowledge into our practices by providing you education and opportunities to expand your understanding of affinity spaces and crip wisdom.

  1:00 - 1:50 pm - The Voices in Our Heads: Interrogating and Unsettling Internalized Ableism  In this paper, I grapple with the internalized ableism I have been navigating upon becoming disabled in 2023. I consider the external forces that shape our ideas about disability with attention to socialization processes and oppressive systems including messages that different representations, ideologies, and structures communicate to the population about disability. I do so to address why these messages are so often internalized in detrimental ways. I specifically engage with policy changes that create external disruptions to ableism in ways that might also encourage the interruption of internalized ableism and conclude with a call to action.

  October 24, 2025

  10:00 - 10:50 am -  In Our Own Time: Claiming Neurodivergence, Identity, Belonging, and Liberation What does it mean to navigate clinical practice, leadership, and cultural identity while living with multiple, intersecting neurodivergences? In this storytelling-based session, a South Asian clinician explores the complexities of ADHD, OCD, and sensory processing, through the lenses of race, gender, and belonging. Blending lived experience with critical theory, this session challenges deficit-based models and reimagines neurodivergence as a source of resistance, wisdom, and care. Participants will engage with narrative, reflection, and creative tools to explore their own identities and reframe what it means to belong—in our own bodies, institutions, and time.

  11:00 - 11:50 am- Recovery Happens Here: Centering Student Experiences in Building Inclusive Practices  The proposed panel presentation focuses on the lived experiences of students in recovery from substance use disorder on the topic of developing and expanding inclusive practices in higher education that promote a sense of belonging, including a focus on peer support, overcoming barriers and multiple pathways to recovery. Research has found college students in recovery are often isolated, marginalized and underserved (Broman, et. al., 2024). A comprehensive approach to recovery supports focuses on reducing barriers and increasing quality of care from a social ecological perspective, including support from peers with lived addiction experience (Xuan, et. al., 2021).

  12:00 - 12:50 pm- Tools with a Purpose: Improve Student Outcomes with Accessible Technologies   MSU IT Educational Technology is excited to present accessibility tools available to faculty, staff, and students. These tools support making digital content more accessible for others and offer support for users with their own access needs. This session will cover accessibility tools like Equatio, Read&Write, OrbitNote, Kurzweil 3000, and D2L’s Alternative Formats.

  1:00 - 1:50 pm - Showcase on Disability Research in STEM at MSU  We want to showcase ways we center disabled experiences in our work. Our research uses “nothing about us without us” as a guiding principle, as our participants and researchers build on personal experiences with disabilities and give power to disabled students. We specifically highlight our pathways in disability research, so that those interested have a framework for how they could be involved or run similar work that centers disabled perspectives. We value actionable outcomes to this work related to students' and practitioners' specific interests and want to give practitioners access to current research that they could integrate into their courses.

  October 31, 2025

  10:00 - 10:50 am - But Wait, There's More!: Teaching Accessibility as a Topic   The accessibility conversation in higher education often centers on how we can support students with disabilities and how to create inclusive learning environments. While this is crucially important, what if we told you that’s not where it ends? In fact, what if we were able to show you how a group of MSU faculty have incorporated accessibility into the content of their courses as well as the pedagogy? That’s right, let’s teach it as a topic to our students! Join us for a great conversation to hear how MSU faculty have done this and how you can, too!

  11:00 - 11:50 am- Transforming Theatre Ensemble presents...  Transforming Theatre Ensemble (TTE) is premiering a new short play developed using a variety of collaborative story making approaches including theatre exercises, games, story circles, research, and dialogue. Following the performance, the actors and Artistic Director Lynn Lammers will give a talkback discussing how both our process and product centered accessibility. The audience will be invited to reflect on the themes of the play, try out some theatre games, and brainstorm ideas for disability-centered stories that need to be uplifted at MSU.

  12:00 - 12:50 pm-  Disability Inclusion in Grad School: Breaking Barriers as Students & Employees  Graduate students with disabilities face unique challenges that intensify the already demanding nature of graduate studies. The Graduate Student Accessibility & Support Network (GSASN) will host a panel and community discussion on the unique experiences of disabled graduate and professional students. Hear from panelists representing a diversity of graduate/professional programs on the barriers they face as both disabled students and employees of the university. Attendees will have an opportunity to ask additional questions before a community discussion on how to increase inclusion, belonging, and accessibility for this historically overlooked population of students.

  1:00 - 1:50 pm - Reimagining Disability Access: Fatigue, Hostility and Intimacy in Higher Education  Disabled students have long faced access fatigue (Konrad, 2021) and access hostility (Samuels, 2021) throughout their college experiences. While recent shifts in higher education have revealed new, innovative ways to implement accessibility, many of these approaches are still denied in favor of maintaining traditional—and often ableist—practices (Campanile, 2020). This session explores how higher education professionals can resist these norms by reimagining accessibility through the lens of access intimacy (Mingus, 2011)—the elusive experience when someone deeply understands and cares about a disabled person’s access needs. Together, the audience and presenters will consider ways to create affirming and accessible campus environments.