Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Did you know it’s legal for certain schools to apply electric shocks to autistic children as a form of “therapy?” It is. It’s horrific. After years of work, the FDA is considering banning it. You can submit your comment here. Shain M. Neumeier, who has been working on this for years, had an op-ed on …
I generally start my presentations on police use of force and disability by talking about a deaf man shot in the back. I like to end (or at least end the section), by talking about non-white men killed while wearing ear buds, talking on cell phones, or not speaking English. It’s a way to point …
Every year, Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, hosts about 3000 medievalists for a giant, sprawling, conference that I call MedievalCon. It has its significant academic context, but it’s also embraced seriously fannish elements (or had them thrust upon it). On Saturday nights, there’s a panel hosted by the “Pseudosociety,” in which academics deliver humorous satirical …
I was going to post this yesterday, but was too sick. Below is a tweet from former graduate student in medieval literature, responding to a petulant tweet by a racist UKIP (right-wing English political party) about an actress of color playing Queen Margaret of Anjou. Hi @CllrChrisWood that’s a lovely medieval image you have there. …
The celebrity with disabled sibling genre of story tend to be pretty awful. The celebrity is asked about their sibling and, in response, the celebrity says things like overcome, inspiration, and other usual platitudes. This is partially because that’s how we’ve learned to talk about disability, partially because celebrities sell clicks and so interviewer isn’t …
Next week, I’ll having a conversation with the brilliant Ada Palmer about her debut novel, Too Like the Lightning (from Tor). Her scholarship on Renaissance reception of Classical knowledge is impeccable, but she’s also the author of a complex, innovative, work of speculative fiction, the first of four books, just released last week. Instead of …
On Tuesday, I praised good NYT reporting on CIT training in Portland, a piece that tried to go beyond the usual platitudes. Today, I’d like to criticize their most recent Room for Debate – on mental health facilities. The truth of a vast publication like this is that while there are overarching standards, it’s made …
Every day, my news feed serves up a few stories about local police departments undergoing Crisis Intervention Team training. Yesterday was Northern Wisconsin and upstate New York. CIT is fine. It provides some good resources to police officers, who generally seem to respond well to the training. It’s resolutely pathologizing, relying on a medical model …
Vilissa Thompson, over at Ramp Your Voice, has put together a “Black Disabled Woman Syllabus.” It’s a massive collection of links from various intersectional angles, a living document always ready to be expanded, and a fantastic resource. Thompson writes: Over the past few weeks, I have been approached by individuals who wanted to understand the …
This is a must read piece on the use of “psychoeducational” schools to segregate predominantly black children in Georgia from their peers. At age 7, David was too much for his teachers to handle. So they decided to send him to a special program — unique to Georgia — called a psychoeducational school. He was …