Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Poster for Different Lenses, One Vision conference. Next Wednesday, November 18, I will be offering a public lecture on police violence and disability at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health for their “Different Lenses, One Vision: A collaborative discussion on ‘otherness’” conference. I argue that the experiences of people with disabilities must be …
Yesterday 11 Alive News Atlanta wrote a story about the murder of Dustin Hicks with the headline: “Dawsonville mother kills son, self, in possible mercy killing.” They followed that with the lede: “Murder-suicide or mercy killing?” As social media began to comment on the phrase, the headline changed to “Dawsonville mother shoots disabled son, self.” …
A woman murdered her disabled son in Georgia. It’s a tragic story. His father discovered when he came to pick up his son for a visitation. This is just brutal: The boy’s father came to pick him up for regular visitation but when he got there, no one came to the door. And that wasn’t …
Elsevier, the giant journal-publishing monster, has always sounded to me like something out of Tolkein, a fallen Elvish city now inhabited only by ghouls and barrow wights, maybe. Yes, I’m a nerd (though not an exceptionally good Tolkein nerd; I never finished The Silmarillion). Here’s a new article that argues academic journal “impact factors” are basically …
This was a pretty special week. I participated in a Poynter Workshop on Disability Journalism with some outstanding local reporters and the great Joe Shapiro, of NPR fame. Truly an honor. Later in the week, I spoke to educators and folks from the corporate world about disability and diversity. Meanwhile, though the semester’s labor is thick upon …
Yesterday at The Conversation, Cecilia Gaposhkin, a medieval historian at Dartmouth, wrote a piece arguing that STEM are not distinct or in competition with the liberal arts. They are the same thing. The idea that STEM is something separate and different than the liberal arts is damaging to both the sciences and their sister disciplines …
Steve Silberman, author of Neurotribes, has won the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction, a prestigious U.K. award. It’s the latest of many prizes, glowing reviews, and appearances high on best-seller lists for this magnificent work on the history and meaning of autism. It directly challenges all the pity and tragedy narratives, without erasing lived experiences …
This case is from 2012, but I first noticed it on this DailyKos diary. It’s a perfect example of the “cult of compliance,” a phrase I’ve been using since 2013 to link otherwise discrete incidents of police brutality, creeping authoritarianism, and broader examples of cultural discourse that venerate compliance as the greatest of all virtues. …
I’m off today to be a panelist at a workshop intended to put advocates in the same room with journalists and PR execs to talk about better reporting on disability. A McCormick Specialized Reporting InstituteThe Poynter Institute, Access Living and ADA 25 Chicago invite reporters from all media to apply for a two-day in-depth workshop …
This is a video of a school bus driver attacking a child with disabilities. It’s hard to watch, but worth watching for the following reasons (and maybe more): The other kids are standing up for their classmate, telling the bus driver he can’t do it. One child was holding the cell phone that caught this …