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…
I finished a major corporate (disability-related) project this week and am hard at work on a major non-profit (disability-related) project now. That, plus teaching, plus the book, has slowed me down in terms of writing for mainstream media, but I trust that the depth of these bigger projects is more than worth it. In the…
When police shoot someone in a mental health crisis armed with – a knife, a knife, a knife, a knife, a hammer, a screwdriver, a broom handle, or a rock or any number of other weapons that are not firearms – the question arises: What could they have done differently? The officers in such case generally,…
Ever since watching the terrible video of a student being pulled from her desk and thrown to the ground, I’ve been waiting to learn how disability intersected with this case. I assumed it would, because the data shows that the two groups most vulnerable to violence at the hands of school authorities are people of…
Here’s a disturbing and complex manifestation of the cult of compliance: Starting next week, San Francisco will be the fifth county in the state to implement Laura’s Law, the measure that allows judges to force severely mentally ill people to get treatment.The measure is targeted toward people who are resisting care and have a history…