There’s a story happening with medicare and “speech generating devices,” especially those involving eye tracking (of the sort frequently used by people with ALS). I’m trying to figure out where we stand now. Last Feb,the folks who admin Medicare changed the rules for speech devices (devices in which you push buttons to make words/phrase). 1)…
I asked a faculty member at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign whether they thought there was any chance that the chancellor and board might reverse their decision on Steven Salaita (you can read here for my take on the case). Their answer – If the scientists (i.e. the people with the money) get involved. So far,…
Today’s stories about compliance take a different spin. Thankfully, no one is being shot or tasered by the police in these examples. Two men have, however, been involuntarily committed for what they might do in the future. One is an English professor. His case has not made the news but he was involuntarily committed and…
It’s been a busy week of writing and I hope you are enjoying this holiday weekend. Most of the week was spent on the cult of compliance and police violence. I started with a piece on CNN on 4 police killings of people with mental health issues. I argued that we need to think about psychiatric disability…
Here are four stories literally just from last night (they happened at different times, but made news yesterday). They illustrate the way racism enables and is enabled by the cult of compliance. The cult provides an intersectional lens in which race and class dominate the middle, with disability not far behind. When these categories overlap in…
Yesterday, I had my first piece published on the Huffington Post. It’s about my daughter’s backpack. The boy came down the hall just as I was arriving at preschool with my daughter, Ellie. In a voice filled with excitement, she said, “Michael [not his real name], come look at my new backpack! It’s the Avengers!” Indeed…
“They reacted based upon the training that they’ve been given from the academy. We were thankful that no officer was injured from protecting themselves from risk of great bodily harm.” I have a new piece on CNN today about police killings of people with psychatric disabilities. I argue that we need to view these cases…
Today in Vitae I have a piece that runs a bit against the grain of my other writing, at least on the surface. I believe we need to do a lot of things differently in terms of graduate education. I believe in change because the status quo – long graduate trainings, little professional experience, the…
It’s been quite a week. Since the publication of my Al Jazeera America piece on the cult of compliance, I’ve done a bunch of press, written a few new essays, prepped for the start of classes (tomorrow!), and pitched some long-term projects. More news on that when there’s news. I was so swarmed with topics…
The apartheid government of South Africa had a problem (well, it had a lot of them, but bear with me). It wanted to discriminate by race, but how does one deal with mixed-race people? It came up with the infamous “pencil test,” in which a pencil is pushed through a person’s hair, and how easily…