Swamp Monster Betsy Devos: Nominee for Secretary of Education

Going to protest the possibility that Betsy Devos could become the Secretary of Education of this country tomorrow at BMCC in lower Manhattan. Watch her avoid responding substantively to any questions about equal protections for all students who have disabilities, who suffer bullying, who take out student loans, who are taken advantage of by for-profit …

The objects of our mission: disability and subjectivity in social media

A friend of mine wrote an article recently about an interesting phenomenon in the ubiquitous conversation about social media: the use of the Internet to access voice, subjectivity, and visibility in new virtual spaces. The article refers to a mildly ironic story of a Russian website, "Dvach," which in the past has opened up space for misogynistic …

Whitewashing disability

Apparently, today ends National Patient Accessibility Week, a fact which I didn’t know in spite of my experience over the last couple of years in the disability world as a graduate assistant at the Institute of Community Inclusion, a member organization of UMass Boston founded on a diversity of missions and a collective force of …

Objectifying/humanizing the “third gender” of disability

Two years ago I worked as a graduate assistant at the Institute of Community Inclusion, a collective of non-profit organizations with various focuses including vocational rehabilitation (VR), disability inclusion, and transitions to civilian life for veterans. It was a terrific experience and I learned a lot about disability not only as a general descriptor but …