Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Sword Bisexual
@shengokai
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Martial artist, motorcyclist, and comics philosopher. Areas: Japanese phil, race, gender, disability, and tech/AI. Pragmatic Dragon. He/Him/His š³ļøāš
Joined March 2009
Master thread of all of my Mastodon and Twitter migration threads:
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I think 2023 will actually be harder because none of us, not a single person except for the massively privileged, has had a moment to recover from the sheer horror and unrelenting brutality of the past few years.
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Roe is a massive disability rights/disability justice issue. Not simply because disabled persons have sex, vigorously, enthusiastically, and quite often, but because there's a long history of the state imposing abortion on disabled persons.
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Anyone who thinks universities are hotbeds of wokeness has never sat through a curriculum committee meeting with a "diverse" course on the agenda, has never witnessed the resistance to approving "area studies" programs, and has never watched faculty argue over hiring priorities.
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I'm this close to making my online syllabus two sentences: . "Fuck it, you all pass. Stay safe.".
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I'm going to put this out there: perhaps we're seeing an uptick in adult ADHD cases because many children with ADHD grew into adults with ADHD whose professions, personal lives, and living spaces provided them with the necessary scaffolds to manage their ADHD.
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Before Labor Day ends, I want to remind everyone that higher education runs on the exploitation of precarious faculty, junior faculty, and graduate students, as well as the support staff who are routinely exploited by administration and their collaborators in the faculty.
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Lucasfilm robbed us of a story about a man forced to serve an oppressive government who discovers he can be more than what they forced him to be while simultaneously baiting every Black fan into believing that we'd get Boyega as a Jedi. I will NEVER forgive this injustice.
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Colleagues, none of our institutions are prepared for what our Black students, staff, and faculty are going to bring back to them in the fall. Not a damn one. Everything happening in our streets is going to be into our classrooms, in our committee rooms, our departments. (1/n).
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Once again I am asking you to stop using Adderall as a stand in for some kind of moral or personal failing. Every time you do, you demonstrate your lack of empathy for people who need stimulant medication to function specifically, and people with disabilities generally.
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People seem really upset that I'd suggest a good education in the sciences should connect the sciences with their socio-cultural impact. To be clear, this knee-jerk reaction, that science is not and has not been political, is a big part of the problem.
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Gonna say the quiet part out loud. The media treatment of Fetterman, the constant questioning of his ability to serve, is literally an intensification of what every disabled person has to endure when we insist on living beyond the limits of ableism.
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My position on the PDF discourse is as follows: I've pirated textbooks for students who cannot afford them. I've used my institutional access to provide colleagues with articles crucial to their research because they could not afford them. Fuck your gatekeeping bullshit.
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So much of academia has been justified with "I suffered through this, and I made it. You'll be okay." . No, dear reader, I will not be "okay," and I don't think you're "okay" either despite having "made it.".
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My hottest, most thermonuclear, and cancel-worthy take is that many contemporary developments in philosophy of disability (and some Disability Studies) have largely and intentionally ignored ADHD because it doesn't rise to the level of a disability worth inquiring about.
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Happy pride month, especially to my bisexual friends. Your sexuality is valid despite your questionable choices in sitting. This is not a euphemism: most of the bisexuals I know occupy chairs, couches, sofas in the most interesting ways possible.
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No the fuck it isnāt. Thereās no control here, no standard pedagogy, nothing to be tested you administrative fucks. All youāre doing is seeing how students respond when faculty donāt have enough time to learn/adapt to the medium. No oneās testing SHIT.
For the first time, entire student bodies have been compelled to take all of their classes online. Jonathan Zimmerman says that now is a perfect opportunity to measure how students learn in that medium compared to face-to-face instruction.
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Read some discourse about how no āPoC countriesā ever did a colonialism, and, wellā¦ *gestures to Japan*.
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You know what, fuck it. I spent a good portion of my philosophical career working on the metaphysical underpinnings that allow Kondo to speak of objects sparking joy. In my view, the responses to her method, and "sparking joy" specifically, are grounded in piles of orientalism.
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We seem to have forgotten that the moral arc of the universe doesnāt bend towards justice unless you jump up and down on the fucker.
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A bunch of twitter alternatives are like āwe donāt have virality, weāre so much better!ā . Yeah, you know who depends on virality? Activists. Social movements. All those things that have shifted the needle where rights and the struggles of others are concerned.
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In my mind, every argument against remote education during the pandemic can be summed up as "fuck disabled people.".
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But seriously, the cultural perception of Adderall as a sign of moral failure and as a form of illicit cognitive stimulant is extremely dangerous to people who need to take Adderall for its prescribed purpose.
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It's all fun and games until the medication that allows you to function in an ableist world is suddenly subject to massive amounts of restrictions due to the cultural understanding of it as a substance to be abused. Oh wait, it's never fun and games.
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How many fucking examples of shitty transphobic journalism do you need before you start recognizing that these fucks aren't interested in reporting the truth, they're not interested in their journalistic obligation to inform the public and hold the powerful to account.
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Academia needs to hurry the fuck up and realize that multiple generations of scholars have been, and will continue to be, fucked by its responses to COVID-19. Iām not just talking about the precarious folks here, Iām talking about the effect on who makes up the academy. (1/n).
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I'm just going to straight up say that transphobic journalism, any transphobic journalism is in violation of the SPJ code of ethics. If hacks like Bari Weiss want to be treated like journalists, let them. Hold them accountable for their shitty reporting and the damage it does.
I have reinstalled Twitter to respond to this story and make sure my voice is fully heard. I am Casey. My real name is Alex but my mom decided it would be best to hide it for anonymity. But this is my story, not hers. This is not the free pressās story.
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Pay graduate students during the summer. That's it. That's the tweet.
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Then they were thrust into a global pandemic, forced to adapt to a new living situation, new caring responsibilities, new social or political challenges, and disconnected from the scaffolds that helped manage their ADHD. So they went looking for a diagnosis, or got rediagnosed.
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Speaking of ADHD in the academy, the sheer look of relief on some of my students faces when Iām like āoh, I have it tooā¦ā makes the whole disclosure thing worth it.
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This is incredibly cruel. Seriously, what the fuck.
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From a comrade: . "Even if there is something consumerist about the way middle class white people especially try to be in community, that's not something that's inherent or ingrained, solidarity can be taught! Praxis creates the comrade, you don't come to this work fully formed".
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I have a really radical idea. What if I walked into the first class of the semester and had the students co-design absence, attendance, participation, and late work policies for the semester?.
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Or, maybe its the case that some of them were putting off diagnosis, did not have the time or the resources to get diagnosed, and were suddenly beset by several unmanageable ADHD symptoms only to find that telehealth was readily available and easy to access.
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Diversity in academia will be fucking dead after the pandemic. If the wave of hiring freezes doesnāt do it, then inequality in publishing will do it. If that doesnāt do it then the academyās retreat from diversity initiatives due to budgetary concerns will do it. (1/n).
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Not to be all ātech is bad,ā but like, this is one of the principle examples of how ed-tech is predicated on a surveillance infrastructure that can then be leveraged against students, faculty, and staff. We also saw it with the evictions of students from housing.
Just learned that @Columbia has locked down every building on campus (deactivated swipe access) and that faculty wishing to visit their offices today require a campus police escort to gain access.
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The WHOLE POINT of pointing out the failure of facial recognition on people of color and Black people specifically is not to correct it: correcting it adds more tools to the oppression we experience daily. The point is that there is NOTHING beyond racism. (1/n).
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Further, as many folks have pointed out: if you cede the authority to the state to determine who can and cannot have an abortion, you also cede the power to the state to impose abortion and sterilization upon you. The latter point is STILL FUCKING LAW in several states.
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Or perhaps we have refined our diagnostic criteria for ADHD, have learned enough about its presentation in adults, that we can more accurately point out the features of ADHD in adults before they're overwhelmed by the symptoms.
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How quickly faculty close ranks around some issues (defending harassers) and not others (equitable work conditions for precarious/junior faculty, adjunctification) is telling as to what and whom the academy is willing to protect.
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Iām running out of people I know who donāt have COVID. And yet, higher-ed is on track for a ānormalā opening. Academic conferences are proceeding in person. Who the fuck are they kidding?.
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The worst part of precarity for me is being afraid to set down roots, to find community, only to have to abandon it months later. Pulling up roots gets more and more painful each time I have to do this shit. And yet, we tend not to think about this as the ācostā of academia.
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So fuck you very much, CDC. As if we don't have enough to deal with from the FDA, physicians, and an entire society that damn near refuses to believe that we're suffering. We'll now have even more shitty regulations to deal with?
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Moreover, given that Black and Brown folks with ADHD are more likely to be incarcerated, more likely to have institutional structures mistake their ADHD for "being difficult," and are thus at greater risk for their lives being upended, this will harm the most vulnerable ADHDers.
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Here's a question for ADHD folks: when working on a project, do you ever just sit with your thoughts and let them kind of "run" until they slide into a pattern that you can articulate?.
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All of these are possibilities to consider before engaging in some ham-fisted regulatory policy that will likely hurt more ADHDers than it helps, that will likely deprive many of them of the medicine they need to function.
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Fuck it. Let's do this. Let's talk philosophy's shit relationship with disability. There is a very, very good reason why people with disabilities often do not disclose their disabilities to colleagues in the field of philosophy. Appiah's recent piece is just part of it. (1/n).
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Moreover, there's a long history of the state seeking to control the reproduction of disabled persons for the good of society. And this history implicates the feckless left as well as the conservative right. None of your hands are clean where this is concerned.
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That moment when your research reads you for fucking filth.
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Just want to remind everyone that disabled philosophers have been telling EVEYRONE about Peter Singer's nonsense for decades and we've routinely been ignored.
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Disabled folks have fought long and bloody fights for the right to control our own bodies, our own reproduction. Roe may threaten to undo all of that. Put another way, if the loss of Roe renders people who can become pregnant sub-persons, this effect is magnified with disability.
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I'm gonna be honest: a good chunk of my pedagogical practice emerges from trying to spare my students the shit I went through when I was an undergrad.
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Moreover, our institutions remain unprepared because of the rampant institutionalization of whiteness that forces every response to racism (or other institutionalized forms of oppression) to be centered around preserving the comfort of white students, faculty, staff. (3/n).
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Our institutions are unprepared to deal with it because those responsible for the organization of higher-ed continue to assume that higher-ed will be immune to these broad changes, that the demands for structural change, for education, do not include academia. (2/n).
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Academics: a whole bunch of our institutions are about to invoke the work of scholars in departments born of struggle, departments that these same institutions have tried for decades to defund, in order to demonstrate their commitment to equity. (1/8).
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I keep TRYING to tell people that the meditative practices upon which "mindfulness" is based have explicit warnings about the dangers of poorly directed mindfulness techniques.
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But, you'd know all this if the history of disability was considered fundamental to the histories of other struggles for liberation. But it isn't, and we will suffer because of it.
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And, with the end of Roe, challenges to these sterilization laws will become more difficult as rights to bodily and reproductive autonomy become imperiled by an emboldened right and a left unwilling to shed blood for our rights.
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Radicalization and solidarity are all processes. And they're processes that are aided either by comrades, or texts, or by experience, but they're not processes undertaken alone. Here, in this moment, we have a whole bunch of people starting the process.
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Happy May Day! That DEI committee that your university is so proud of runs on the uncompensated labor of minoritized students and faculty. Moreover, this labor requires them to revisit their trauma in the form of recommendations that are ignored by administration.
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You can't have a meaningful discourse with someone whose whole position is your annihilation.
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Academics. We all know that the federated structure of mastodon is really shit for academia, yes? Like, one of the relentless arguments made by administrators and academics alike is that we need to get out of our fucking silos, yes? Well, mastodon is silos all the way down.
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So, I can finally say this. I'm pleased to announce that I will be joining the California State University, Northridge Department of Philosophy as a tenure track Assistant Professor.
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Further, our institutions remain unprepared because they continue to treat Black faculty, staff, and students as the enemy, or the problem, when we bring to light the inequitable conditions under which we labor and learn. @SaraNAhmed's "Against Students" is excellent here. (4/n).
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To be clear, the rejection of "sparking joy" is grounded in a western rejection of any metaphysic that privileges the affective connection with the world over reducing the world to objects of knowledge. Specifically, objects of scientific (or discursive) knowledge.
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If you really want a standout example of the academy's ableism, the requirement for times new roman is a good place to start. We've known about the benefits of sans serif fonts for folks with sensory processing disabilities forever, and we've REFUSED to acknowledge this.
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They won't accept "listening sessions" or "open forums" or "meetings with the Dean/Provots/President" or the other mechanisms that are deployed to disempower them, because they're the higher-ed equivalent of police reforms: incremental change that keeps whiteness in place. (7/n).
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As long as disability justice is framed in terms of accommodation, then our justice will be experienced as an imposition, and only grudgingly granted.
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Did you know that if you ask students to submit an abstract, then a rough draft, then have them peer edit that draft, all before submitting a final paper, those final papers you end up with are MUCH easier to grade?.
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I LITERALLY WROTE A WHOLE GODDAMNED CHAPTER ON THIS. IT IS IN THE BLOOMSBURY GUIDE TO PHILOSOPHY OF DISABILITY. IT DREW ON A DECADE OF FUCKING RESEARCH.
Trained AI models exhibit significant disability bias.
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There's a reason I called the retreat to Mastodon "white flight," and why many folks have described Mastodon as the HOA of social media.
Man. Folk want twitter to die SO BAD. I get that Edgelord Musk is a problem but itās feeling real āurban renewalā-ish because when this place goesā¦WE will be displaced.
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There are a whole bunch of folks in the academy at junior levels, both faculty and students, who will not survive this semester. I don't mean they're going to die; I mean the rush back to "normal" and the return to the unsustainable pace of the academy will drive them out.
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Because Black faculty, staff, and students become the problem when they pose the problem, the institution becomes arrayed against them, seeks to pacify them, and does so in a way to preserve the comfort of whiteness. None of this is new information. (5/n).
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Thus, we've all been using the language of "sparks joy," but we haven't attended seriously to how that language actually functions. And, as a result, all of these shit-takes on Kondo smack of hypocrisy and orientalism.
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In other words, the rejection of Kondo isn't just a rejection of her system, it is a rejection of a way of viewing the world as organized primarily around our affective relations to objects in the world and how those relations orient us in specific ways.
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This rejection ultimately privileges a "rational" explanation for possessing an object over an affective one, regardless of the fact that we primarily experience the world as affective, rather than as an object of scientific understanding. We speak of things "feeling right.".
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You know what? You could not do BLM on mastodon. It just wouldnāt work, not with the federated nature, not with the inconsistencies with CWs, not with the gatekeeping bullshit across instances, and not with the get off my lawn mentality of the user base.
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And who will higher-ed institutions turn to for help?. Not the departments of Ethnic Studies, African American Studies, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, whose existence they've resented and resisted for decades, and who they've undermined through resource deprivation. (10/n).
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My thread on the Singer paper has apparently upset some folks with my characterization of its conclusions and how I associated it with a larger trend of using academic freedom to defend bigotry and marginalization. I'd like to begin my response with the following:
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Those of you who've been following me for a bit know what my response will be. You've seen it before. For those of you who are genuinely upset that I believe scientists need to understand the history and socio-cultural implications of their work, all I have for you is this:
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The usual responses (e.x. form a committee) will be inadequate when what's happening in our streets comes home to our institutions. The faculty, staff, and students who're out in the streets, being arrested, drafting statements will not accept institutional handouts. (6/n).
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This is actually pretty interesting. What the general does in his comments is position CRT as a framework, as a tool to enable him to do his job as a soldier, and he does so by proceeding through multiple areas where CRT would enhance his ability to perform his job.
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To conclude: "sparking joy," isn't simply in reference to whether or not the thing makes us happy, but how the thing inspires an affect in us and what that affect is. To "spark joy," I argue, simply means "does the object move us in a way that enriches our space.".
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@christapeterso I like to come up with increasingly goofy ways to address this. I definitely ask my students "was this true of the dinosaurs," when they use "since the dawn of time.". I actually had a student try to argue that.
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Hell, I'm willing to go so far as to say that we should cut individuals out of our lives who do not "spark joy," whereby "sparking joy" means that they bring an affective relationship to our lives such that our lives are enriched. People who do not do this, we call "toxic.".
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Kinda have an obligation as a scholar of Japanese philosophy to point out that Japan has quite often exercised its colonial ambitions within its borders and BEYOND.
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Finally, let us not forget the students workers who, in addition to working for sub-par pay while taking classes and being exploited by an uncaring administrative class, are often rendered unable to advocate for themselves.
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Today, Rose passed after fifteen years of faithful companionship. I will miss her always.
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To be clear, the academy that many of us holds so dear runs on the exploitation and maintenance of a class of vulnerable workers. In fact, our ability to enjoy the fruits of the academy is contingent (pun intended) on the maintenance of this exploited class.
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Iām just gonna say the quiet part out loud: very few of the COVID responses by higher-ed center disability, either in faculty or students. Any accessibility gains as a result are purely coincidental and dependent on a the benevolence of ableist institutions.
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And, given the way that COVID-19 has made us all precarious, has made available access to spaces typically denied to students and faculty (e.g. public university reliance on governance via zoom), I expect that we'll see more disruption of business as usual in higher-ed. (fin).
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I really want us to stop and think about this for a moment: none of us came to our various struggles fully equipped to deal with them. Hell, none of us came to our current politics, radical or otherwise, fully equipped to articulate them.
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(As an aside, try telling someone with ADHD that their disability is easily remedied and uncomplicated. I dare you.)
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Not the multi-cultural or other marginalized resource center, whose existence they saw as unnecessary or frivolous, or as a means to satisfy student demands without actually engaging in meaningful structural change, and then relegated to diversity month programming. (11/n).
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They won't accept any of the ususal responses because they're out in the streets: it's our faculty, staff, and students who're, organizing marching, protesting, speaking up, providing aid, and working to dismantle a system that enables inequality in higher-ed. (8/n).
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But also, the unique nature of this bird app and how it allows communities to form is why we need to fight for it. Iām dead fucking serious about this. To surrender twitter to the trolls teaches them that they can drive people out of any space they want.
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Still further, this exploitation has reached unprecedented levels during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as fear of job-loss allowed administration to force vulnerable higher-ed workers into hazardous situations to maintain their bottom lines.
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Definitely not the Black faculty, staff, and students who have tried endlessly to warn and to educate through our service commitments, through our committee work, through our participation in your diversity efforts only to see those efforts rendered impotent by whiteness. (12/n).
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