Ethnic Studies and Disability Studies Go Hand in Hand

For a discipline that seeks to understand the experiences of up to one-in-four Americans and 1.3 billion people worldwide, there is a glaring lack of disability education on Harvard’s campus.

This academic year, only two Harvard undergraduate courses included the word “disability” in their title. In response to the lack of course offerings, in 2022, the Harvard Undergraduate Disability Justice Club called for the creation of a disability studies department.

Harvard’s lack of disability education is not unique, but its resistance to fixing it is. In 2023, UCLA offered a disability studies major for the first time, and campuses across the nation have created disabilities studies minors. Despite efforts from groups like HUDJ, these goals have yet to materialize at Harvard.

To better understand the case for disability studies, we can look to the decades-long fight for ethnic studies at Harvard and beyond. Ethnic studies, like disability studies, centers the experiences of marginalized students and communities, carving out academic spaces where students so often neglected by universities can feel that they belong.

But, to be clear, ethnic studies is far more than an affinity space. A discipline in its own right, ethnic studies teaches unique theoretical approaches to understanding the histories, narratives, and interactions of and between minority groups in the U.S.

The same is true of disability studies.

Disability studies is not just a conglomeration of courses about disability — it is also a field that offers frameworks for an interdisciplinary analysis of access, impairment, and how disability is socially and legally constructed in societies. More fundamentally, disability studies investigates how structural power impacts our bodies and our spaces.

Unfortunately, many Harvard undergraduates won’t ever encounter it.

The University’s reluctance to create an ethnic studies concentration — much less any kind of disability studies program, degree, department, or certification — reflects its continuing neglect of both student demands and scholarship that falls outside the Eurocentric disciplinary mainstream.

Without Harvard’s support, students interested in such fields are forced to search for courses on disability strewn across disparate departments or in the various graduate schools. Oftentimes, students can’t receive credit for these courses, either because they don’t fit into their concentration or because College departments are often reluctant to offer degree credit for graduate school courses.

Students have long been fighting for curriculum overhauls, beginning with the 1968-1969 strike at San Francisco State College, which led to the creation of the country’s first ethnic studies department. Three years later, the first proposal for a similar field at Harvard was put forward by Harvard History professor John Womack Jr.

Despite over five decades of student and faculty organizing, only recently have tangible strides been made toward the formation of an ethnic studies concentration. Pressure from Harvard’s student organizers led to the establishment of an Ethnicity, Migration, Rights secondary in 2009 and an Ethnic Studies field within the History & Literature concentration in 2017.

Disability advocates must work alongside the ethnic studies movement and increase pressure on administration to address the paucity of courses on disability and continue to push for the formation of a disability studies department.

Granted, disability studies has not always lived up to its stated goals. The overrepresentation of white scholars and advocates in the disability rights movement makes this cross-disciplinary framework all the more timely and essential.

Both ethnic studies and disability studies connect theory with community and knowledge with action, challenging the ways we are trained to see the world. At Harvard, it’s time we give both the attention they deserve.

Andrew Q. Kang ’27, a Crimson Editorial comper, lives in Grays Hall.