Read the Disability Inclusion Action Plan 2019-2024
Event_
Disability Inclusion Week
Our stories, our community
The University celebrated our ninth Disability Inclusion Week from 4-8 September 2023.
This year's theme was "Our Stories, Our Community". All members of the community were invited to share stories from staff and students with lived experience of disability, celebrate as a community, and work together to raise awareness and inclusion.
The program featured para-sports on Eastern Avenue, a storytelling session with disability rights activist Senator Jordon Steele-John, as well as insights into digital accessibility, career paths, and supporting students with ADHD from those with lived experience.
Hidden disabilities sunflower initiative
We launched the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower initiative at the University during Disability Inclusion Week. This global initiative is designed to create a more inclusive and supportive environment for people with hidden disabilities in our community.
The initiative aims to make invisible disabilities visible through the use of the sunflower image on lanyards, pins or bracelets. By wearing the sunflower lanyard, people with hidden disabilities can let others know that they may need a little extra help, understanding, or more time.
If you would like to get a lanyard, you can contact the Inclusion and Disability Services team (for students) or the Diversity and Inclusion team (for staff).
Behind the artwork
"As an intersectional person who is Indigenous, CaLD, Fat, Female, LGBTQI+, and Disabled, I am a multi-faceted prism. Bigotry lasers into my privileged white-passing skin, and is reflected outwards everywhither along the rainbow spectrum. Transformed. Adapted. A revolution.
I am a Rainbow Australian. A Crystal. A Rhizome.
Though the word rhizome is derived from a Greek word meaning "to take root", the rhizome is not about the common tree structure whose branches have all grown from a single trunk.
Rhizome subverts such traditional hierarchies.
Rhizome offers liberation from these structures of power and dominance.
Rhizome has no beginning, no centre and no end.
Rhizome can be entered from any point, and all points are connected.
When injured or broken at one site, rhizome simply forms a new connection that emerges elsewhere.
Rhizome is not about what is or what was, but about what might be.
To quote Deleuze and Guattari: "The surface can be interrupted and moved, but these disturbances leave no trace, as the water is charged with pressure and potential to always seek its equilibrium, and thereby establish smooth space."
By viewing my work you become part of my Rhizome.
Welcome to the community. We’d love to hear your story."
