Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Today I wrote my first piece for the Catholic website – Crux, talking about the problems with the references to disability in the recent papal letter. One argument – the rights of disabled parents, so easily abrogated, seems like a natural place for a moral agent like Pope Francis to invest some time addressing, but it’s …
Discussions around police use of force and disabled civilians usually turn quickly to training. In Chicago, for example, several high profile deaths resulted in mandatory CIT training for all Chicago officers – in policy anyway. It’s not clear whether funds have been allocated and to what extent the training is ongoing, but that’s another story. …
The pope (or rather the social media managers) tweeted a line from “Amoris Laetitia” – the papal exhortation on love, marriage, and family, this morning. I didn’t like it. I hadn’t, however, read the actual document, and wanted to correct that. Here’s a collection of relevant excerpts from the English translation with some initial thoughts …
UPDATE: See this post for the full passages on disability from the recent papal document on marriage/family. I made my leap into public writing when Pope Benedict stepped down and Pope Francis was elected. Both events had strong medieval tendrils and, for awhile, much of the rest of the press kept being confused what Francis …
I’m at George Washington University today for a conference on: “Composing Disability: Crip Ecologies,” a conference focusing on forms of narrative, storytelling, exchange, communication, and more. Here’s the precis: Crip Ecologies: This symposium seeks to bring together scholars, artists, advocates, and activists working across the fields of ecocriticism, disability, and queer studies. Our goal is …
I’ve been tracking job requirement issues over the past few months, so I was pleased to see this from Hennepin County (Minneapolis, more or less, where I used to live): Say you have been tinkering with computer brains your whole life, but your college degree isn’t in computer science or a related field. Chances are …
Today at my university, over 250 students will spend the day sharing the fruits of their labors. The presentations will range from short-term semester-long projects to panels and talks on capstone projects on which the students have been working for years. We’ll have a presentation on beekeeping, staged readings of 10-minute plays, music inspired by …
Yesterday the Sanders campaign released a statement on New York’s new 15$ minimum wage law. So much credit goes to the fight-for-15 folks who have the seemingly impossible into a new norm in progressive states around the country. On disability, Sanders wrote [my emphasis] “I’m proud that today two of our largest states will be …
I spend a certain amount of my time critiquing reporting on disability: Inspiration porn, mercy killing discourse, how disability links to police use of force, and of course so much more. My basic premise is that journalism matters, language matters, and often the media fails to handle admittedly tricky topics very well. This is especially …
Over a year ago I wrote about problems with the ABLE Act, the well-intentioned bill that the divide-and-conquer wing of the GOP was tweaking into semi-irrelevancy. It passed with a definition of disability that only included those disagnosed before age 26, a sign of the way too many politicians like to differentiate between the worthy …