While on the academic job market over the past few months, I had many opportunities to define myself as a scholar. You get particularly good not only at elevator pitches—short, pithy descriptions of your intellectual interests and dissertation project—but also at sketching out your intellectual formation. My research and teaching interests have primarily been in…
Tag: Disability Studies
Disability as Experience
In this post, I’d like to make things a bit more personal than I have so far. Last week I got into a debate with a professor. It’s not important what this debate was about. Instead, it’s important what this debate wasn’t about. This professor was asking my class—myself and six other graduate students/artists—to participate…
Disorientations: On Disability in Graduate School
Sara Ahmed, in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), asks what it means to be orientated. By thinking through sexuality in terms of lived, embodied experience, Ahmed challenges us to think about how queer bodies occupy space and time. She writes that “if orientation is a matter of how we reside in space, then sexual…
Twin Studies
Back in September, I found myself in a small community just outside of Ithaca, NY, in the company of several colleagues from Cornell. We were there to participate in community’s annual “Fun Run.” I use the term “fun” here with some reservations, defining it provisionally and according to terminology that was current when I ran…
Making meaning in the everyday: understanding autism through the interpersonal in Swim Team (2017)
Kathryn Cai The recent documentary Swim Team, which is currently being screened across the US,[1] closely tracks the lives of three teenagers in suburban New Jersey as they navigate their everyday lives. The teens are all on the autism spectrum, and the team was formed by Mike and Maria McQuay in part because their son…
