Disability Studies

Literature Review on ABA, critical analysis of history of ABA

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rQ-TNsvw5e-f84z0GL2Fg36u8eoT-Y7bSUf8q40ET9c/edit?usp=sharing

Pamphlet - Resources for Families

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1xhcZEQas9WA0UgWbrJg4JoCIHBNtRkTKg-gfDToefos/edit?usp=sharing

Below, I will attach my midterm project, a comic about eugenics and statistics. If you would like to listening to an audio recoding of the comic, click on this link 

https://youtu.be/8fby9oXlVek

Please let me know if there are any issues with the link.

reading the "Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life" reminded me of "The Collected Schizophrenias Essays" by Esme Weijun Wang, so i wanted to talk more about the presence of mental illness/madness and how it affects our experiences in academics. Esme Wang's chapter, "Yale Will Not Save You", details how her experience at Yale defined her as a schizoaffective person, and how, eventually, the misdiagnosis of Bipolar disorder, the hesitancy to treat and medicate, and the pushout of mentally ill students led to her suicidal and out of school.

The NPR podcast about the sterilization of women covers a lot of horrifying stuff. I am aware of the inhumane practices of mental asylums back in the day, since I did an internship last summer doing research on the racist practices in asylums in the pre-Civil War era. Patients were often isolated from others and physically constricted using straps and other tools, and the patients who experienced the worst treatment were those in public asylums that were overcrowded and underfunded. But I didn't know about the practice of sterilization in asylums, though, unfortunately, it doesn't surprise me at this point.

In this post, I wanted to reflect on Unspeakable Conversations and how the disabled community, both from the article and my own experiences, treat each other within activist circles. 

Out of all the pieces we read this past week about disability identity and justice, the one which resonated the most with me was Sins Invalid's Ten Principles of Disability Justice, and in particular the ideas of sustainability and interdependence. Throughout my life, I have been exposed to disability in the unfortunately standard way in the US: if you are disabled, you either "fix yourself" so as to become independent and productive in society, or become a burden to your family, social services, etc. if you are unable to do so. I became very detached from that label and community of disability, being conditioned to see it as only inclusive of that supposed latter group who "could not fix themselves" and became something a little less than human in the eyes of society.

TL;DR: The pandemic has demanded new ways for everyone to access the world. Some of these forms were more accessible for disabled people than the pre-pandemic world. Can we keep what we have gained in an ableist society that wants to return to "normal"?

Moses's Speech Disorder in Commentaries on the Torah

Here are a few pages from "The Gene: An Intimate History" by Siddhartha Mukherjee that I found relevant after today's discussion.

If this sample isn't too technical for you, this is a great book that both goes into the details of how genetics works and does an excellent job of covering the eugenics movement in America (and elsewhere, but primarily America). The author himself had several schizophrenic relatives, who he talks about a bit in the book. 

Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is an often-misunderstood mental disorder caused by overwhelming childhood abuse. To survive the abuse, the child will adopt different identities/personalities that protect their 'main' identity from having to experience it all at once. In popular media, DID is usually a simple 'multiple personalities' shtick, used for horror, with most of the causes not being discussed.