Journalist – Historian – Speaker
I’ll have a piece later today from CNN on the shooting in San Bernardino, CA. I’ve written about gun violence for them before. I’m sitting in a small square room, cluttered with books and papers, at the end of a short dead-end corridor. I’m a history professor at a small university, sitting in my office …
The Star Tribune has a great five-part series about disability and work, focused on Minnesota, but looking more broadly – Failing the Disabled. Here’s one I like, because it’s a positive outcome. With her zest and ambition, Wollum personifies the remarkable strategy that has made Vermont a leader in the civil rights movement for adults …
There is new video of the death of Linwood Lambert. If police want to have TASERs, which they do and they should, then the people who abuse them have to be held accountable. When three Virginia police officers put Linwood Lambert in a squad car around 5 a.m. on May 4, 2013, they said they …
Poster for Different Lenses, One Vision conference. Next Wednesday, November 18, I will be offering a public lecture on police violence and disability at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health for their “Different Lenses, One Vision: A collaborative discussion on ‘otherness’” conference. I argue that the experiences of people with disabilities must be …
Yesterday 11 Alive News Atlanta wrote a story about the murder of Dustin Hicks with the headline: “Dawsonville mother kills son, self, in possible mercy killing.” They followed that with the lede: “Murder-suicide or mercy killing?” As social media began to comment on the phrase, the headline changed to “Dawsonville mother shoots disabled son, self.” …
A woman murdered her disabled son in Georgia. It’s a tragic story. His father discovered when he came to pick up his son for a visitation. This is just brutal: The boy’s father came to pick him up for regular visitation but when he got there, no one came to the door. And that wasn’t …
This case is from 2012, but I first noticed it on this DailyKos diary. It’s a perfect example of the “cult of compliance,” a phrase I’ve been using since 2013 to link otherwise discrete incidents of police brutality, creeping authoritarianism, and broader examples of cultural discourse that venerate compliance as the greatest of all virtues. …
This is a video of a school bus driver attacking a child with disabilities. It’s hard to watch, but worth watching for the following reasons (and maybe more): The other kids are standing up for their classmate, telling the bus driver he can’t do it. One child was holding the cell phone that caught this …
I finished a major corporate (disability-related) project this week and am hard at work on a major non-profit (disability-related) project now. That, plus teaching, plus the book, has slowed me down in terms of writing for mainstream media, but I trust that the depth of these bigger projects is more than worth it. In the …
Ever since watching the terrible video of a student being pulled from her desk and thrown to the ground, I’ve been waiting to learn how disability intersected with this case. I assumed it would, because the data shows that the two groups most vulnerable to violence at the hands of school authorities are people of …