The front screen door opened and then closed. I thought it was a package. But then I heard male voices on my porch. Was the delivery man saying hi to a neighbor? After a few minutes, when they continued, I opened the door to find a police officer on my porch, another on the sidewalk…
Many work wellness programs work like this – get regular checkups, hit various benchmarks of health, get money! It’s a way for business to lower their health care costs by rewarding people for making healthy choices. Except that according to the ACLU, these bonuses are basically closed to people with disabilities. Moreover, there’s no real…
David Johnson is my main editor at Al Jazeera America, so to the extent you appreciate the pieces I write there, you have him to thank (along with several brilliant assistant editors). All mistakes, of course, are my own! But he’s also a philosopher and what one might call an “alt-academic,” someone who took his…
I like books! I wrote a book (and think we need to reconfigure how they work professionally). Books are, however, notoriously inaccessible to people with certain kinds of disabilities, whether it’s because of vision issues of various sorts, motor control, etc. A group of disability studies scholars have published a letter on making books accessible,…
This is a guest post written by Ellen Arnold, PhD. Arnold is Assistant Professor of History at Ohio Wesleyan University and author of Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes. Follow her on Twitter. Read more of her work on this site here. The capacity to imagine a “whole earth”—fragile, surrounded by emptiness,…
Happy Father’s Day! Let’s fight the patriarchy. Here’s just one issue out of many in a new piece from Al Jazeera America. I am hardly alone in needing to find a way to make a lot of moving parts fit together. Working dads are so normal that we don’t even talk about it. A Google search…
As I watched the finale of Game of Thrones, I spent a lot of time thinking about sexualized shame. We’re in a kind of ongoing conversation about internet shame lately, with much of the drama focused on white people who feel really uncomfortable being taken to task by historically marginalized groups (people of color). The…
By now you know about the massacre in Charleston, perpetrated by someone reported to be adorned with white supremacist symbols [Update: It’s clear that the killer was not wearing such symbols at the church, but on a separate occasion]. The temptation, especially from racism apologists, will be to explain away the violence by focusing on…
Neurodiversity is a powerful concept, taking the ideas of intellectual and psychiatric disability and wrestling them into the diversity narratives. In the diversity narratives, we don’t try to cure or fix, but to accept, understand, accommodate, assist, and hopefully eventually move to a place where we recognize same-ness in our differences. Bringing disability into the…
I have a new piece up at Al Jazeera America about barriers to inclusions in US schools for children with disabilities. I am in regular conversation with parents across the U.S. who are struggling through much more difficult situations, whether from abuse, mockery or just general resistance to meeting a child’s needs. Sometimes school districts are…