I’m happy to announce that my second book, Black Disability Politics, is now in production w/ @DukePress, slated for a Fall 2022 release. This book documents & theorizes about how Black cultural workers have engaged disability as a political concern historically & in the present.
This book is written with both academic & organizer/activist audience in mind, providing praxis interludes between the historical chapters to demonstrate how we can learn lessons from mistakes of the past to better incorporate disability into Black liberation work today.
I am so proud of this book & honored to shine some light on the history & value of #BlackDisabilityPolitics. It’s been many years in the making & I can’t wait to share it with all of you.
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Like most laws, the increased criminalization of marijuana targets & punishes poor folks who can’t afford to drive to the border & pay high taxes at a dispensary to get weed. Most people believe at least medical should be legal but the WI GOP wants to waste time on this shit.
Wisconsin politics are somehow simultaneously evil, backward & nonsensical. These folks didn’t pass a fucking thing last year. Just kept suing the Governor over a mask mandate. Just trying to make money & let people die.
Trying to make anti-racism & anti-sexism education illegal. Trying to make state schools ask legislators permission to have COVID precaution requirements. Now trying to make smoking weed more of a crime when I can drive an hour to where it’s fully legal? No wonder people leave.
UW folks, anyone else who got summer pay in August have a lower paycheck amount coming tomorrow? I just looked at my paystub and it’s like 25% less net pay than my last paycheck. Our department currently does not have an HR or financial person to ask.
And I got bounce back/away messages from the two L&S HR people I e-mailed. 😫
Also I got this email last month about them taking out extra money from my second August paycheck which says I should be getting more money this paycheck not less. 😫😫😫 Stop fucking me over in a pandemic!!!
I used to be friends with someone with generational wealth who took me to their family’s Wisconsin summer home several times to swim in the most gorgeous pool I’ve ever been in. That person turned out to be a fully fucking terrible human, but sometimes I still lust for that pool.
To be fair, they were partially a terrible human bc of the generational wealth. When you’ve never needed to make money & lack an understanding of how much your privileged, international-vacation, show-horse-owning, multiple homed life differs from others, you do fucked up shit.
It’s not an excuse, especially not into your 30s, but I understand how wealthy privileged isolation hindered their empathy & ability to take responsibility for their behavior.
Each workday I post my #WorkGoals of things I plan to do. These are SMART goals; specific, measurable, achievable, realistic/relevant & time-based. It includes my teaching & meetings as well as research & grading tasks. Whatever needs to/can reasonably get done.
I set daily goals during the academic year as a way of keeping myself focused & not overwhelmed. I started this practice as part of @NCFDD’s Faculty Success Program in 2015 as a first year tenure track professor trying to balance teaching, research & service for the first time.
Disabled people with compromised immune systems (students, faculty & staff) are going to be forced out of universities across the country in the name of getting back to normal & academic capitalism. This is unconscionable.
It is from these very disabled folks that many learned how to switch to remote work, work in isolatio, which masks to use, and so on and so on. That crip knowledge was essential during the first stages of the pandemic & now, now we say, fuck you to disabled people. Again.
Telling people to take a leave of absence is not a solution, especially when it is unpaid, especially for students who depend on scholarships to survive. Telling faculty to just teach online unofficially, under the radar, only helps tenured faculty (sort of).
My second book is out for final review. I’ve figured out what my next project is. Now I need to do IRB again. I can’t tell yall how grateful I am to be trained as an interdisciplinary scholar & to be in an interdisciplinary department where I can do the work I want to do.
Grad school Sami, only interested in literary & textual analysis, rolled her eyes in required methods class while learning about the IRB process but now as I start to do more interview-based work, I’m grateful I learned what I did when I did.
I don’t identify strongly w/ being an academic, but I do enjoy research & I value knowledge creation/sharing for social justice purposes. My projects are always based on what feels important to me in a given moment. I’m so glad I have this kind of intellectual & labor freedom.