I like books! I wrote a book (and think we need to reconfigure how they work professionally). Books are, however, notoriously inaccessible to people with certain kinds of disabilities, whether it’s because of vision issues of various sorts, motor control, etc. A group of disability studies scholars have published a letter on making books accessible,…
This is a guest post written by Ellen Arnold, PhD. Arnold is Assistant Professor of History at Ohio Wesleyan University and author of Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes. Follow her on Twitter. Read more of her work on this site here. The capacity to imagine a “whole earth”—fragile, surrounded by emptiness,…
Happy Father’s Day! Let’s fight the patriarchy. Here’s just one issue out of many in a new piece from Al Jazeera America. I am hardly alone in needing to find a way to make a lot of moving parts fit together. Working dads are so normal that we don’t even talk about it. A Google search…
As I watched the finale of Game of Thrones, I spent a lot of time thinking about sexualized shame. We’re in a kind of ongoing conversation about internet shame lately, with much of the drama focused on white people who feel really uncomfortable being taken to task by historically marginalized groups (people of color). The…
By now you know about the massacre in Charleston, perpetrated by someone reported to be adorned with white supremacist symbols [Update: It’s clear that the killer was not wearing such symbols at the church, but on a separate occasion]. The temptation, especially from racism apologists, will be to explain away the violence by focusing on…
Neurodiversity is a powerful concept, taking the ideas of intellectual and psychiatric disability and wrestling them into the diversity narratives. In the diversity narratives, we don’t try to cure or fix, but to accept, understand, accommodate, assist, and hopefully eventually move to a place where we recognize same-ness in our differences. Bringing disability into the…
I have a new piece up at Al Jazeera America about barriers to inclusions in US schools for children with disabilities. I am in regular conversation with parents across the U.S. who are struggling through much more difficult situations, whether from abuse, mockery or just general resistance to meeting a child’s needs. Sometimes school districts are…
Police violence against people with hearing loss is a far too common occurrence and serves as a central evidence for the cult of compliance. These people are being killed not for being threats, but for not following commands promptly. I am also interested in the ways that ear buds, cell phones, and those around other…
This spring I unexpectedly became a TV writer for Vice.com I’ve am trained as a critic, but had been writing mostly about hard news for CNN and Al Jazeera, and higher ed for the Chronicle. Still, I did think and write a lot about medievalism in modern media (news and entertainment) as well as representations…
This is a resource post for an upcoming piece about work/life fit and our gendered discourse. I believe these results are a problem for everyone and will discuss it more fully. In the meantime, you too can open a search window and replicate my results. All searches from 6/12/15. 112000 results for “working dad.” 134000…