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Apr 22 2026

Disability Justice and Student Mental Health

TAP/IDHD/LEND Webinar Series

April 22, 2026

12:00 PM - 1:00 PM America/Chicago

Cost

FREE

Calendar

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How might we reimagine student mental health through a disability justice framework? How can we think about addressing mental health without centering medicalized interventions?

Join us as we share the results of the research project, Mental Health Storytelling for Disability Justice to explore how we can think about better supporting mental health on college campuses.

We will be drawing on data collected from interviews and focus groups conducted with UIC students in the Spring and Fall 2024 semesters. Come learn what students wish faculty and administration knew about mental health, what barriers students face, where they find support, and most excitingly, what dreams they have in terms of mental health!

This research was funded by the Student Affairs Faculty Research Fellow Program and each year, the program supports select UIC faculty who conduct research in areas relevant to Student Affairs.

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Contact

jae jin pak
jjpak@uic.edu

Submitter

jae jin pak
jjpak@uic.edu

Date posted

Apr 2, 2026

Date updated

Apr 2, 2026

Speakers

Nico Darcangelo | Associate Director | Disability Cultural Center

I received my PhD from UIC in the Social Foundations of Education, and while I am interested in a lot of different topics, my main focus is on psychiatric disabilities/mental health, students, and education/schooling. I spend a lot of time thinking about systems of power, privilege/oppression, abolition, community care, and disability justice. My professional life before the DCC included a variety of things from campus programming, to being the director of a Sexuality Summer Institute, to teaching several critical education courses, like Critical Disability Studies in Education and Gender & Sexuality in Education. I received my master’s degree in Sexuality Studies from San Francisco State University, and that is when I was introduced to disability culture for the first time. I went to a Sins Invalid performance in Fall 2009, and it changed my life – I’ve been working to deepen my relationship to disability culture and disability justice ever since!

Nicole Nguyen | Associate Head and Professor | Criminology, Law, and Justice - College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Nicole Nguyen (she/her) is professor of criminology, law, & justice. She also is a 2022 Soros Justice Fellow. As a feminist geographer, Nicole ethnographically investigates the intersections of national security, war, and US public schooling. This research agenda contributes to, and draws on, grassroots struggles challenging racialized policing, war, and empire, particularly in collaboration with community organizations like Vigilant Love. Nicole teaches classes on the school-prison nexus, alternatives to incarceration, and qualitative writing. From 2018 to 2022, she led the College's Creating Cultural Competencies initiative, which included curricula and teacher workshops related to countering anti-Muslim racism in schools and classrooms. With Dan Cohen and Alice Huff, she co-created the Critical Geographies of Education specialty group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), which works to promote, organize, and advance critical geographic explorations of education and schooling; support the scholarly growth of critical geographers of education; and contribute to social movements related to struggles over schooling.