Archive for December, 2007
Book Club: Run
This month’s book club was our annual holiday outing to Grants Restaurant in West Hartford. Although the place is really too loud to have a good discussion, especially this time of year, their desserts are so great it’s worth it!
Oh, yes, the book. This month we read Ann Patchett’s latest novel, Run. [...]
“Fearing our Students” — Chronicle Column
I read Thomas H. Benton’s lastest column in the Chronicle of Higher Education with a mixture of empathy and horror. I definitely have had students who have given me the creeps (including one who followed me to my car after a graduate seminar, although eventually he quit when I told him firmly to cool [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Holiday Disability Blogging
Penny Richards over at Disability Studies, Temple University has posted some vintage links just in time for the holidays. Since I’m too inept to figure out how to post using WordPress (despite following instructions!) I’ll just comment here on Andrea’s disability analysis of “Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer.” I think she has some good [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )More on AHA Panel, School Violence, and Youth Suicide
Now that I have all my fellow panelists’ papers, I can get a better sense of what I want/need to say. Roger Lane points out that school shootings are very rare events although could take a longer view on this. There are several cases of students murdering teachers from the nineteenth century, including that [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )Happy B-day to Me and DJ Hope
Hi folks,
Today’s my birthday, which I share with my identical twin sister, aka DJ Hope. The theme of this week’s Disability Blog Carnival is my favorite things — my birthday is certainly one of them!
People often ask me, so what’s it like being a twin? I always reply, well, what’s it like being [...]
What is “Normal Sadness”?
I took my periodic look at The Saltbox, written by my colleague in the English Department, and noticed that he his latest contribution to Bookslut is an interview with Christopher Lane, author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale UP, 2007). I think there are legitimate concerns about the overmedicalization of [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )Men Behaving Badly on Listservs
Why is it that male academics spend endless hours pontificating about their rights to free speech, then when a dissenting female decides to raise her voice, tell her to shut up? Don’t believe me? Here’s the latest reply I received to my discussion of IRBs on the Cheiron listserv:
“Heather: In all due respect, [...]
IRBs and the Constitution
A flurry of discussion on IRBs continues on the Cheiron listserv, much of it regarding the claim that IRBs are by their very nature unconstitutional and should therefore be abolished. One respondent referred me to the ACLU website.
I couldn’t find any information from ACLU regarding the ways in which IRBs limit free speech — [...]
