Hello, my name is Ally 

My interest in disability studies began after I took Disability in American Literature during my junior year at UConn, where I first heard about Mansfield Training School. I originally approached both the class and the legacy of MTS through a sort of detached lens—  I was interested in learning more about disability, but disability wasn’t an experience I or the people around me were a part of. As I began to participate in discussions and read more about disability through the perspective of activists and authors like Riva Lehrer or Cece Bell, I realized how my own familial ties to disability had been swept under the rug and purposefully overlooked since I was a child. 

I’ve always believed in the power of storytelling to prevent erasure. Disability history, on both an institutional and personal level, continues to be buried by the passage of time. This burial is seen on a macro and micro scale with the lack of history taught in K-12 schools as well as the family stories of disability not being discussed at home. The only way we can prevent people and their experiences from being forgotten is to tell their story in full, the best way we can. Our research team has spent hours at the archives, pouring over documents left behind at the Mansfield Training School (MTS), but our job is just one piece of the complex puzzle. I hope the work our research team conducts will shed light on the wrongs done to residents at MTS as well as encourage survivors of institutional abuse to share their stories.