It’s a story that the disability world has been following for months, if not years. Yesterday, the Los Angeles Review of Books published my thoughts about the Anna Stubblefield case, facilitated communication, sexual ableism, and the need for more complexity about disability in our rhetorics and our courts. Please read it: I try to do a few…
I am heading to the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy to talk about disability studies. I have a peculiar relationship with the field, as my published work is in cultural history, focusing on Venice, political myths, narratives of materiality, hagiography, and the pre-modern Mediterranean world. My next book, though, will be on contemporary disability…
My friend RC alerted me to this piece on a police training simulator for learning how to reduce misuse of force when encountering autistic people or people with various mental disabilities. It touts the virtues of the virtual playback versus role-playing-based training. Through the simulator, deputies are immersed in true-to-life scenarios — exactly the kind…
Thesis: The idea that your students have guns will have a vastly more chilling effect on academic freedom than people asking for trigger warnings, less offensive language, or to be thoughtful about microaggressions. Coming soon from CNN. (Update for new readers. Hi new readers! Here are some of my writing about Trigger Warnings and PC…
I’ve been writing about trigger warnings, political correctness, and safe space issues for almost two years now (starting with this CNN piece, but extending throughout my blog, including ‘trigger warnings are your friends.’). There are at least two different strains of critique of the notion of microaggressions on campus. One is from mostly male white semi-liberals who…
Some suggested rules for life as a good person: Don’t take pictures of disabled strangers without their consent. Don’t share the pictures you shouldn’t have taken to the internet without their consent. Their story is not your story to do with as you see fit. A picture of a Kroger employee helping a blind customer…
The Name of the Rose was my first glimpse into what it might look like to interrogate, depict, and perhaps even understand medieval culture. It started, of course, with Sean Connery and Christian Slater, in the movie, but I soon moved to the book. It was beyond me. So much Latin. So much assumed knowledge….
There’s a new hashtag campaign around saying the word “disability.” It is initiated and led by my friend and writing companion Lawrence Carter-Long. I am wildly in favor. I am trying, in my writing this year, to write the sentence: “There are no special needs, only needs” as often as possible. We all have needs….
Nice article in the local paper on de-escalation training for Park Ridge law enforcement. Last year, a U.S. Justice Department grant secured by the Park Ridge Police Department allowed for officers to take crisis intervention training, a program that aims to prepare officers to deal with citizens struggling with a broad spectrum of mental health…
#CripTheVote has become an important hashtag, founded by Alice Wong, Andrew Pulrang, and Gregg Beratan, intended to bring disability into the conversation around the 2016 presidential campaign. Like most forms of online activism, its primary function (to my mind) is to thicken networks. We tweet, we use the hashtag, we encounter each other and find…