“Disability studies prevent disability dongles.”
“I honor the friction of my disability.”
Yes! Another great talk from Liz Jackson.
Tag: disability
Instead, the college admissions scandal should draw attention to a different problem: That the companies that develop and administer standardized tests have no empirical basis for placing such an emphasis on speed. Yet these companies do put a terrible premium on speed, even though the notion that faster is better has been debunked: In fact, a student’s scores on such exams correlate in a perfect linear relationship with socio-economic status rather than with a student’s ability to solve difficult problems.
Stringently timed, high-stake tests have an adverse impact against racial minorities, women, those with low socio-economic status, non-native speakers of English, older applicants, and people with disabilities. Of course, that adverse impact is further exacerbated when the ultra-wealthy cheat to inflate their children’s scores.
Sometimes it takes another person with your specific disability label, not another neurotypical teacher or peer, to help the world understand your experience. One of the first books I read about autism was Donna Williams’s memoir Nobody Nowhere: The Extraordinary Autobiography of an Autistic (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1998). One of her observations has always struck me as particularly apt: “Communication via objects was safe,” Williams says. For me, computers are objects that can be a bridge to interpersonal connection and growth. Those are things we all want, regardless of our differences.
Source: Valuing differences: Neurodiversity in the classroom – kappanonline.org
See also:
Bring the backchannel forward. Written communication is the great social equalizer. – Ryan Boren
Being disabled means hundreds of thousands of people believe they always know better than you do. I’ve spent my life—both before my epilepsy and autism and mental illness diagnoses and after—listening to authority figures and peers tell me who I am.
Disabled allyship rarely extends to those who are actually disabled. We answer their questions, and they choose not to listen.
In this essay I use identity-first language (‘disabled women’) instead of person-first language (‘women with disabilities’). Beyond the political and collective reasons for this choice (#SayTheWord), I don’t like the preposition ‘with’. Prepositions are for relationships; I am not in a relationship with disability.
There’s a sort of instinct that comes about when the world was designed to kill you. It tells me when I’m up against someone who doesn’t believe I exist.
I asked them to invent things for us, the cyborgs who are already here, already alive.
Most cyborgs are disabled people who interface with technology. We depend on a computer for some major bodily function. The tryborg – a word I invented – is a nondisabled person who has no fundamental interface. The tryborg is a counterfeit cyborg. The tryborg tries to integrate with technology through the latest product or innovation. Tryborgs were the first to wear Google Glass. Today they wait in line for Snapchat Spectacles. The tryborg adopts the pose of a cyborg. But no matter how hard they try, the tryborg remains a pretender.
The tryborg may be an early adopter, a pro gamer, a TED Talker, a content creator or a follower. The tryborg may be an expert who writes about cyborgs for screenplays, lab reports or academic journals. The tryborg may just be a guy named Bob who works in I.T. and collects Real Dolls. Whatever the case: Tryborgs can only imagine what life is like for us.
The tryborg is always distanced by metaphor, guesswork and desire. When my leg suddenly beeps and buzzes and goes into “dead mode” – the knee stiffens; I walk like a penguin – the tryborg is alive without batteries. When I sound like a bomb in a liquor store, the tryborg hurries on, nonelectronic.
Source: Opinion | The Dawn of the ‘Tryborg’ – The New York Times
I started to ask a simple question of experts who provide and organize legal defense for condemned prisoners: How many people on death row are disabled? The answer came back unanimously: pretty much all of them.
The status quo is shifting: Just last week, the state of Washington abolished the death penalty after a compelling statistical analysis demonstrated that juries were four times more likely to condemn black defendants than white defendants. Eventually, either wholesale abolition or at least expanded exemptions will come to the remaining death penalty states, including Texas, but likely not in time for Kwame Rockwell.
Source: Kwame Rockwell Will Be the Next Disabled Person Executed by America – Pacific Standard
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