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Disability Awareness: Organizations

This LibGuide is about Disability Awareness and how inclusiveness helps everyone.

Associations, Organization & Research Centers

  • AHEAD: Association on Higher Education And Disability
    AHEAD is a professional membership association for individuals committed to equity for persons with disabilities in higher education.


  • Canadian Centre on Disability Studies
    The Centre for Canadian Disability Studies (CCDS), now known as Eviance, is a knowledge hub, a place for researching and communicating to advance the disability movement. They continue to build and bring together communities to solve important issues and advance human rights.


  • The Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies, Syracuse University
    Disability Studies at Syracuse University builds on the work of the School of Education in studying disability. Their programs help students examine disability as a social phenomenon, social construct, metaphor, identity, and culture. They are at the forefront of the development of the theoretical, research, educational, and advocacy models necessary to remove the social, legal, physical, policy, and attitudinal barriers that exclude people with disabilities.


  • Center on Knowledge Translation for Disability and Rehabilitation Research
    The purpose of the Center on Knowledge Translation for Disability and Rehabilitation Research (KTDRR) is to make it easier to find, understand, and use the results of research to make a positive impact on the lives of people with disabilities. The Center on KTDRR carries out integrated training, dissemination, utilization, and technical assistance activities to increase the use of valid and relevant evidence-based research findings to inform decision-making and increase the understanding and application of knowledge translation principles.


  • Centre for Disability Studies, University of Leeds
    The Centre for Disability Studies (CDS) is united by their commitment to carrying out research and teaching that helps to achieve equality and social justice for disabled people, globally. The CDS works on the sociology of disability, disability politics and policy, disability law and human rights, inclusive design (transport systems and assistive technologies) and Deaf Studies. Additionally, the CDS is a centre-of-excellence in teaching Disability Studies across several undergraduate programmes.


  • The Disability History Association
    The Disability History Association is an international, nonprofit organization dedicated to the historical study and teaching of disability across all time periods and contexts. Take a look at their series "Stories from the Archives: Experiences of Disability in Early America"


  • Disability History Museum
    The Disability History Museum fosters a deeper understanding about how changing cultural values, notions of identity, laws and policies have shaped and influenced the experience of people with disabilities, their families, and their communities over time. It aims to provide people with and without disabilities, researchers, teachers and students, with a wide array of tools to help deepen their understanding of human variation and difference, and to expand appreciation of how vital to our common life the experiences of people with disabilities have always been.


  • Disability Social History Project
    The Disability History Project is a community history project and we welcome your participation. This is an opportunity for disabled people to reclaim disability history and determine how to define ourselves and our struggles. People with disabilities have an exciting and rich history that should be shared with the world. (See: Why Study Disability History?)


  • National Arts and Disability Center
    The mission of the National Arts and Disability Center (NADC) is to promote the inclusion of audiences and artists with disabilities into all facets of the arts community. The NADC is a project of the UCLA Tarjan Center. The information, consultation and referral services of the NADC aim to strengthen the capacity of the mainstream arts community to include artists and audiences with disabilities, and promote the professional development of artists with disabilities through access to educational, vocational and community activities, supports and networks.


  • The National Organization on Disability
    For over forty years, NOD has worked for a more inclusive and equitable society where people with and without disabilities have equal opportunity to find work, earn a fair wage, and advance in their career. Through our proprietary tools and resources, data analysis, hands-on support, and thought leadership, we have achieved real change and positively impacted millions. To learn more download our About NOD one-pager.


  • Society for Disability Studies
    The Society for Disability Studies (SDS) highlights the importance of bringing multiple voices together to co-construct the future of disability studies across multiple areas – academia, community, grassroots movements, art communities, and organizations. Disability studies has vital emerging roles in helping to elevate the voices of Disability Justice activists, especially in promoting intersectional scholarly and advocacy work.


  • Paul Longmore Institute on Disability, San Francisco State University
    The Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University studies and showcases disabled people's experiences to revolutionize social views. Through public education, scholarship and cultural events, the Longmore Institute shares disability history and theory, promotes critical thinking, and builds a broader community. We envision a society where everyone believes the world is better because of disabled people.


  • Institute for Human Centered Design
    The Institute for Human Centered Design is committed to advancing the role of design in expanding opportunity and enhancing experience for people of all ages, abilities and cultures through excellence in design. Variation in human ability is ordinary, not special, and affects most of us for some part of our lives. Design is powerful and profoundly influences our daily lives and our sense of confidence, comfort, and control.


  • Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology (DO-IT), University of Washington
    The DO-IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology) Center is dedicated to empowering people with disabilities through technology and education. It promotes awareness and accessibility — in both the classroom and the workplace — to maximize the potential of individuals with disabilities and make our communities more vibrant, diverse, and inclusive.


  • CAST: Center for Applied Special Technology
    CAST is a multifaceted organization with a singular ambition: Bust the barriers to learning that millions of people experience every day. They do this by helping educators and organizations apply insights from the learning sciences and leading-edge practices to educational design and implementation. CAST envisions a world where all learning experiences in school, the workplace, and life are intentionally designed to elevate strengths and eliminate barriers, so everyone has the opportunity to grow and thrive.


  • Braille Authority of North America (BANA)
    The mission of the Braille Authority of North America is to assure literacy for tactile readers through the standardization of braille and/or tactile graphics. BANA creates rules, make interpretations, and renders opinions pertaining to braille codes and guidelines for the provisions of literary and technical materials and related forms and formats of embossed materials now in existence or to be developed in the future for the use of blind persons in North America. BANA often works in international collaboration with countries using English braille.


  • Sins Invalid-Disability Justice
    Sins Invalid is a disability justice performance project that supports and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized. Led by disabled people of color, Sins Invalid’s performance work explores the themes of sexuality, embodiment and the disabled body, developing provocative work where paradigms of “normal” and “sexy” are challenged, offering instead a vision of beauty and sexuality inclusive of all bodies and communities.