From the Travels of Ibn Battuta. That night, while I was sleeping on the roof of the cell, I dreamed that I was on the wing of a great bird which was flying with me towards Mecca, then to Yemen, then eastwards and thereafter going towards the south, then flying far eastwards and finally landing…
WARNING – VERY DISTURBING DEPICTIONS OF ABUSE This is what happens when the prison becomes the default first-line of care for people with serious mental health issues. This is what happens with prison guards grow up in a culture demeaning people with disabilities. This is what happens when you feed the cult of compliance. This…
Yesterday, KQED – NPR in San Francisco – published a long piece on police killings and psychiatric disability in San Francisco. 58% of all police killings involve forms of disability such as schizophrenia, many of them include weapons, and yet there may be ways to rethink strategies that could save some of the lives. The piece…
The new Thor is coming out, in which Thor’s hammer goes to a woman, and she become Thor. My daughter, who is 5, is excited. Stay tuned for Halloween costumes later this month, in which she raises her hammer into the air, and shouts, THOR! I’m not a comics expert, but Marvel seems to have…
UPDATE – 10/07/2014: I am still collecting comments focused on how being abroad in an NEH seminar or institute made a difference to your teaching and scholarship. I am now waiting on FOIA requests to be delivered and am sticking on this story as long as I can. If the comment page doesn’t work for…
One of my absolutely favorite writers on disability, Lydia Brown, is at Georgetown. She’s an increasingly well-known voice on disability issues and, not surprisingly, was asked to provide a training to student organizations about accessibility. She agreed. No one showed up. In a powerful post, Brown explains what the empty room means. Nothing demonstrates more…
My first ever op-ed was published in the Minneapolis/ St. Paul Star Tribune. It was in 2006 and on the use of medieval rhetoric to talk about modern problems in the Middle East, a situation that continues today. Over the weekend, the Star Tribune published this full-page ad raising the worst kind of fear-mongering about transgendered…
This week I had one published piece and a blog on the conference interview in academia, a practice that puts financial pressure on those with the fewest resources. It must end. My next step will be to try and understand why it isn’t ending. I wrote a piece using the language of “presume compliance.” As…
In the world of Down syndrome, we talk about “presuming competence” (hey, go buy a shirt!). That instead of “awareness,” we’d like to see a shift to a general presumption of competence first. More on this in pieces to come. I’ve been working, though, on ways of re-describing the strategic problems with police procedure as…
In South Carolina, a state trooper pulled over a man for a seat belt violation. The man got out of the car, as he was heading to a gas station, when the trooper confronted him. The man ducked his head into his car to get his license and the officer opened fire. The man leapt…