The new Thor is coming out, in which Thor’s hammer goes to a woman, and she become Thor. My daughter, who is 5, is excited. Stay tuned for Halloween costumes later this month, in which she raises her hammer into the air, and shouts, THOR! I’m not a comics expert, but Marvel seems to have…
UPDATE – 10/07/2014: I am still collecting comments focused on how being abroad in an NEH seminar or institute made a difference to your teaching and scholarship. I am now waiting on FOIA requests to be delivered and am sticking on this story as long as I can. If the comment page doesn’t work for…
One of my absolutely favorite writers on disability, Lydia Brown, is at Georgetown. She’s an increasingly well-known voice on disability issues and, not surprisingly, was asked to provide a training to student organizations about accessibility. She agreed. No one showed up. In a powerful post, Brown explains what the empty room means. Nothing demonstrates more…
My first ever op-ed was published in the Minneapolis/ St. Paul Star Tribune. It was in 2006 and on the use of medieval rhetoric to talk about modern problems in the Middle East, a situation that continues today. Over the weekend, the Star Tribune published this full-page ad raising the worst kind of fear-mongering about transgendered…
This week I had one published piece and a blog on the conference interview in academia, a practice that puts financial pressure on those with the fewest resources. It must end. My next step will be to try and understand why it isn’t ending. I wrote a piece using the language of “presume compliance.” As…
In the world of Down syndrome, we talk about “presuming competence” (hey, go buy a shirt!). That instead of “awareness,” we’d like to see a shift to a general presumption of competence first. More on this in pieces to come. I’ve been working, though, on ways of re-describing the strategic problems with police procedure as…
In South Carolina, a state trooper pulled over a man for a seat belt violation. The man got out of the car, as he was heading to a gas station, when the trooper confronted him. The man ducked his head into his car to get his license and the officer opened fire. The man leapt…
Yesterday I had a piece at Vitae on ending the conference interview and last week I had a blog post on the same topic, as a sort of prequel. Today, I offer a few fundamental premises. 1. The job market today is about adjuncts, not graduate students. A lot of my friends and colleagues and random…
Ableism in Action – These are comments from my recent CNN article on Kanye West. These are not trolls. These are people genuinely trying to express their thinking. Italics are me. Many of the issues here relate back to my post on “Hidden Disabilities,” featuring longer comments from readers. hgflyer lollardfish • 7 minutes ago…
Special Olympics Washington tweeted to me this: Special Olympics WA@SO_Washington@Lollardfish Our apologies. The intent was not to glamorize or offend. The name has been changed to “Run with the Cops”. Plz read below: They then deleted that tweet (hence no link), but later re-confirmed that they are changing the name. Here’s their statement in full. I…