A month or so ago, UIUC professor Susan Koshy wrote a piece on being the target of a boycott. She supports the candidacy of Steven Salaita. She’s angry at the administration for their conduct. She writes (behind the paywall. I will quote as extensively as seems reasonable): For someone like me, who is inside the…
Principal forces student with Down syndrome to remove high school letter jacket: http://t.co/9dsd9hxZNC pic.twitter.com/WxLdUQjyaa — USA TODAY Sports (@USATODAYsports) March 27, 2015 USA Today Sports has a new piece on a boy with Down syndrome forced to remove a letter jacket. His mother had bought him the jacket, he loved it, but because he’s not…
Preamble: I make mistakes Sometimes, I make mistakes. Often, those mistakes emerge from my privilege – straight, white, tenured, able-bodied, neurotypical, married, etc. I say something or do something that is exclusionary, hurtful, or simply wrong. If I’m lucky, someone calls me on it. If I’m very lucky, after I apologize and try to make…
One response to ableism, eugenic ideology, or just plain ignorance is to tout the achievements of people with disabilities. Sometimes it can veer into inspiration porn or cuteness porn, but I’ve long thought that there’s a bigger problem. If we define the worth of an individual by what they do, and then say – look,…
I’ve become increasingly interested in nostalgia, especially when used as political discourse (following the scholarship of my friend Matthew Gabriele (@prof_gabriele), a professor at Virginia Tech). It reminded me of this recent essay from Andrew Potter, the editor of Ottawa Citizen, on the “Rise of Neo-Primitivism.” Potter describes the “neo-primitives” imagined by speculative fiction author William…
Recently, I’ve seen a positive trend – Academics talking bluntly about money. Talking about money doesn’t besmirch intellectual activity; rather, being paid fairly enables more and better intellectual activity. We exist in a profession in which talking about money is gauche. We’re supposed to work because we love it (read this essay on the exploitation…
The arguments for Sheehan vs SF are a little weird. Predictions, always fraught for the Court based Monty Python: The Argument Clinic on oral arguments, are going to be even harder in this case, because the city changed their brief between cert (when SCOTUS took the case) and filing. From the arguments, it’s clear that…
Oral arguments for Sheehan vs San Francisco will begin at the Supreme Court in a few hours (it’s the second case of the day). It will provide the opportunity for the court to do a number of things. Here are the questions before the court: Whether Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act requires…
I have a new piece out today at Al Jazeera America on the upcoming Supreme Court case – Sheehan vs San Francisco. I write: Twenty-five years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), people with disabilities are regularly dying at the hands of police officers across the country. In just the last few weeks,…
Tomorrow, 3/21, is World Down Syndrome Day, so called because of the 3 copies of the 21st chromosome that marks the condition. Last year, I wrote about the limits of cute. I expanded that argument in the Fall with this “Beyond Cute” piece for Al Jazeera. Cute is the first move, it gets people to…