The AWP and Disability Inclusion

BY STEPHEN KUUSISTO The writer Quintan Anna Wikswo has written an “Open Letter to the AWP Regarding Disability Rights” which you can read here: http://bumblemoth.com/open-letter-to-awp-regarding-disability-rights/ If you’re not an academic writer—a poet, novelist, short fiction writer, playwright, or non-fictionist who makes her living teaching you might not be aware of the AWP, more comprehensively known…

Teaching in the Age of Trump

BY STEPHEN KUUSISTO When I was very small I didn’t know that I’d meet people who wouldn’t like me until one day, climbing stairs with my father, my hand in his, we met an elderly Swedish woman who lived just below us and who said, “Tsk, Tsk” because I was blind. I was only four…

Disability, the Academy, and Gestural Violence

By Stephen Kuusisto   In his essay “How Can We Explain Violence Against Disabled People?” Dan Goodley, Professor of Psychology and Disability Studies at the University of Sheffield argues that offenses against the disabled have their origins in ableist cultural practices. He points to the circulating practices of ableism: The cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek, in his 2008…

Asking for a Friend: Is it Me or is it My Campus?

Photo: Stephen Kuusisto walking in academic convocation at Syracuse University with his guide dog Nira By Stephen Kuusisto I’m borrowing my title from Liza Featherstone’s new advice column in The Nation which is entitled: “Asking for a Friend: Is It Me or is it Capitalism?” Oh the sang froid of self help! One scarcely knows…

Disability, and It's a Long Way to Tipperary

By Stephen Kuusisto   “Well what do you want?” asks the ableist. “We have to weigh your request for assistance against all the other non-disabled people’s requests.” The ableist is in her forties, young enough to know better, was educated at a university, must have come into contact with feminism. Surely knows about equality. That’s…

Perhaps They Need to Read More at the New York Times?

By Stephen Kuusisto There’s a dialogue in the most recent Sunday New York Times Book Review entitled “Whatever Happened to the Novel of Ideas?”  which, by its very title, inveigles readers to believe, even before setting out on the stertorous voyage, that good old smarty pants novels have been abducted, or killed off. The headline…

Why the University of Iowa Has Been Suborned

By Stephen Kuusisto I wrote yesterday on my blog Planet of the Blind about the selection of J. Bruce Herreld as the new president of the University of Iowa. The title of my post was: “On the Suborning of Free Speech and Shared Governance at the University of Iowa”—a conscious decision on my part, for I believe that the…

On the Suborning of Free Speech and Shared Governance at the University of Iowa

By Stephen Kuusisto   When Iowa’s Board of Regents selected J. Bruce Herreld, a businessman with no prior experience in education, as the new president of the University of Iowa they affirmed three principles: the university is now strictly a business, the faculty and students are to be put in their respective places, and those places…