So very excited to have @JayDolmage here at Kenyon to talk about academic ableism and the contradictions and potentialities of Universal Design. His book, Academic Ableism, profoundly impacted by sense of self as a disabled academic and how I navigate the academy (open source and available here): press.umich.edu/9708722/academ…

I made the really difficult decision to move all my classes online. I did anonymous surveys in each of my classes and the care and thoughtfulness expressed among the students for each other and for me just made me cry. I felt so awful having to make this decision, especially knowing my first years are already feeling so anxious and disoriented but the mounting cases and quarantined students missing classes made it hard for me to continue asking them to come to my classroom despite masks.

I still struggle immensely with the loss of people from my life, especially when they leave abruptly. I've been ghosted enough by partners, friends, and family that I expect to not feel the sting as badly. But it never hurts any less, never stops becoming internalized. I know also that people do this for sometimes very legitimate reasons, and I am open to them so long as I know why or at least have the faintest sense of why. I know better than to expect it as "common decency" but decency is in fact not always common and not always owed to you.

First-year pandemic faculty diary #2: one of the hardest parts of beginning a new job has been discovering how many new relations of owing you enter into. You begin to owe more and more to people in ways you don't fully expect nor prepare for. /1 I distinguish "relations of owing" from "indebtedness" because the latter I see as reciprocal: feeling indebted to colleagues, friends, mentors, and loved ones who have invested in and supported me. The former feels like a perpetual giving that always finds replacements. /2

Writing and researching on the cultural history of vaccination and vaccine hesitancy has given a particular edge to my anger as I watch outspoken anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers triumphantly get their vaccines ahead of people who have fought for their validity and necessity. I've only come to appreciate the immense power of cultural narratives that surround medical practice. How and why we talk about medicine in public matters just as much as the science behind the procedure itself. Good public health has to be accountable to those publics.

The academy's ableist practices, especially expectations of neurotypicality, are ensuring futures of higher education without disabled scholars. #MakeAbleistsUncomfortable As Mel Y. Chen has put it, you either comply with being a "disciplined cognator," or you are the "unthinkable" in academia's ableist cultures of hyperproductivity to be left behind or kept out.

Apparently unpopular opinion: the best thing I ever did in graduate school was begin writing for public audiences and not seeing peer-reviewed and paywalled academic journals as the only space where urgent conversations happen. This becomes especially clear with scholars claiming to do social justice work but then entirely divorcing their work from those communities they claim to speak for. Writing to and for those publics should be central. They are not your tenure material.

I've been getting a lot of messages over the past few weeks about good readings for the anti-vaccination stuff going on, so here's "Immunity and Vaccination: a Syllabus"! /1 Nadja Durbach's Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907 (fascinating study of the Victorian anti-vax movements and their relationship to the gothic, liberalism, and activist organizing. This was the largest anti-medical campaign in western history!