congrats to everyone for thinking this through before signing very big contracts to put it on every student’s device at the school or university you run

Wondering why no one likes your posts anymore, even among your friends? It's because @jay.bsky.team and team have decided to hide a huge amount of content from all of our feeds by default. Here's how to turn it off. First go to the hamburger menu in the upper left corner

Okay writing instructors (or anyone who teaches invitational rhetoric or intercultural communication in some way), I have a great recommendation for a game that emphasizes community building and learning about each other through storytelling: Story Stitch! www.greencardvoices.org/programs/sto...

The first two episodes of the revival of Reading Rainbow have nearly 500,000 views each 🤯 Do you know how cool that is for literacy, for book joy?! We are all worthy of reading, we are all readers 💚 And NOW episode three is out! Take a look, it’s in a book 📚🌈🦋 youtu.be/e4VIV48ZB0M?feature=shared

My morning class is interrupted every day at 11:40 by a campus tour. Today I lost track of time and was dramatically telling a story about a former professor who repeatedly made us watch PETA videos of animals dying. I said, “I was like I’M DYINGGGGG every day in class” right as a tour walked past 🙃

A thread of dogs, because this is what we need today, starting with el Negro Matapacos May his spirit protect the Sumud Flotilla and all protesting for freedom Enjoy this timeline cleanse 🧵

My writing process: 1. Think about the topic for several weeks without any research or writing beyond recording a random voice note or jotting an idea in my notes app ~50% 2. Research the topic and/or similar genres ~20% 3. Brain-dump every thought I have about the topic ~10% 4. Revise and edit ~20%

Your email finds me deeply burned out and disassociating.

I love taking snacks to class for work days or peer review workshops. Usually I choose the safest, plainest snacks possible. Recently, my strategy is to buy random snacks from the Asian market in town and watch my students react to random textures/flavors, and it is an absolute delight.

Pretty common thing I get told when I point out an accessibility fail: "They mean well, so give them a break." Unfortunately, that's not how this works. Accessibility is about what is and isn't, not what's intended. Giving people breaks for half-assing accessibility just normalizes inaccessibility.

I was honestly feeling dread about scheduling a day in first-year writing where we read and talk only about AI, but students had really interesting things to say about what they think the purpose of higher ed is and how AI can facilitate or hinder that, as well as a slew of ethical concerns.

I will remind folks those images of Nazi book burnings aren't burning just any books. They're burning the library of Magnus Hirschfeld; a gay, Jewish doctor who created an institute dedicated to LGBTQ sex education and healthcare. And a man who pioneered gender affirming care surgeries.

Is this digital humanities?

I bought small (4"x5") notebooks for the students enrolled in my first-year writing class this semester. The goal is to journal periodically about their writing processes. I distributed them in class today, and it was so cool seeing them all writing by hand about their processes.

I am the type of colleague who talks trash almost constantly but will also bake cookies for the staff/faculty/grad students in celebration of us making it through the first week of classes. It’s all about balance 😅

There are so many things that worry me about AI. Environmental racism, algorithmic biases, unethical labor conditions, mental health crises, AI hallucinations, the coordinated push to get people to think/read/write solely with AI (diminishing critical thinking/reading/writing skills) are just a few.

The fact that American universities don't want students to learn critical thinking skills (and are now framing AI usage as an ethical responsibility) is such a red flag.

Wanna learn more about the Panthers’ work around disability? It wasn’t just the 504 sit-in. I have 2 chapters about them in my book Black Disability Politics which is available for purchase or free open access here from @dukepress.bsky.social: library.oapen.org/handle/20.50...

I wrote about how Trump's threat to end mail-in voting is just his latest attack on disabled people, some of whom find voting by mail to be much more accessible, at @motherjones.com. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

I am admittedly a grinch, but even I have to admit that there is something very special about the energy in the classroom on the first day of classes—especially when you're teaching first-semester first-year students. All 25 of them were seated and chatting five minutes before class started. 😌

I wouldn’t say I feel the normal excitement for the start of a new academic year in the face of *gestures wildly* everything that’s happening around the world, across the country, and within higher ed, so I’m leaning heavily into the most care-focused pedagogy I can muster this semester.

WU-TANG FOREVER 👐🏽

Here's the zine of our interview with Richard Amm of Disability Action Research Kollective on anarchism and disability. This and a growing lineup of zines available for printing and reading at tfsr.media/zines/#June2...

When you’re asked to consider disability justice, it’s never “instead of” a different cause. It’s a call to support every justice movement deeply & effectively. Climate change, capitalism, fascism, racism, transphobia, sexism, genocide, &c are disabling. They want to disable those who resist, too.

I have to know: Do airplane seats destroy other people’s backs, or is it my scoliosis? Sometimes I’m blinking back tears before the plane has even taken off.

The fact that I haven’t seen a mask in a single photo from a recent accessibility in higher ed conference is honestly too fitting a metaphor for many academics claiming to care about accessibility or disability “justice.” I’m not surprised, but the lack of surprise doesn’t make it hurt less.

"Writers have been using me long before the advent of AI. I am the punctuation equivalent of a cardigan—beloved by MFA grads, used by editors when it’s actually cold, and worn year-round by screenwriters. I am not new here."

I struggled a lot with academic conferencing pre-covid (travel anxiety, social anxiety, dietary restrictions, zero ability to network, etc.), but I worry that I'm no longer cut out for conferencing.

Here it is: A guide to understanding our new concentration-camp era and how to fight it. From Andrea Pitzer, drawing from her global history of concentration camps, a history of how humanity turned to camps and what it takes to turn away from them.

Please get off my tl if you think it’s fine to let the use of the r word slide, because you want to bring people ‘onside’. The exploding use of the word is symptomatic of the growing acceptance of eugenics/fascism. And You can’t claim to want to ‘fight fascism’ and accept the use of the word.

"An absolute moral failure." Around one in three disabled people are on Medicaid. I spoke to disability advocates about how devastated they are that the House passed the budget bill that will slash close to a trillion from Medicaid at @motherjones.com. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

I vividly remember the Islamophobic discourse of the early 2000s that never really went away and the false claims about how not supporting war hurts troops/the economy/the nation. I didn’t fall for it as a teenager, and I sure as hell ain’t falling for it now. War hurts everyone.

Before covid, I used to attend 2-3 academic conferences a year and am now averaging one every two years (and only the smaller-scale ones) because I have zero interest in getting sicker for a “professional” organization that doesn’t even pretend to care about me/my wellbeing.

This thread is the only thing I’m enjoying on the internet today.

if you care to think of yourself as an ally to marginalized people, as a comrade of mine, but you are not wearing a respirator at a protest? you’re not wearing one on transit you took to and from? why? who are your actions in alignment with?

The Trump administration's attacks on DEI will hurt disabled students. More from @seemiaroll.bsky.social‬ in ‪@teenvogue.com‬:

stop advertising your thing as disability justice when it's actually disability access challenge 2025

Today was the final class meeting of #DisabilityStudies. I incorporate disability and accessibility issues into all my writing classes, but I've never had an opportunity to teach a class like this where the sole focus is disability and everyone has opted into the class.

I was so pleased when I received an email earlier this week from the president of my alma mater (Hollins University) explaining why she signed this letter.

Wildflower/grief thread. Every spring, my body remembers my senior year of college—my mom going into hospice, rushing to finish my finals so I could say goodbye, the sound of my professor wailing when she asked how my mom was at graduation. I spend a lot of time in the woods in the spring.

The fact that even my university's disability services office uses automatic alt text (which is always inaccurate or incomplete) for social media posts is a great example of why I have beef with those offices. It's never about accessibility. It's about bare-minimum compliance. #AccessibleHigherEd

I gave a presentation to folks in another department on campus today about universal design. The final “question” was about our uni president’s announcement last week to comply with the anti-DEI executive orders: “Accessibility is part of DEI, and that’s gone now. Any thoughts about that?” 💀

ASAN, Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network, the Autistic People of Color Fund, Autism Society of America, Autism Speaks, The Arc, and others stand united: Autistic people deserve respect, support, and science-based policy, not dangerous disinformation. autisticadvocacy.org/2025/04/lead...

We're winding down #DisabilityStudies next week with accessible presentations. I specify "accessible" because I require students to draft full or partial scripts (using inclusive, anti-ableist language), incorporate signposting phrases, design an accessible slide deck, describe images aloud, etc.

I chatted earlier with a grad class that had read my book: #RhetoricsOfOvercoming. One of the most pressing questions I get from grad students is about how to prioritize accessibility without overextending yourself and/or encouraging practices that conflict with your own access needs.

Students in #DisabilityStudies submitted final project drafts today, and I’m loving the range of topics and genres: inclusive choreography, a zine about religion, a magazine spread on accessible fashion, a video memoir, a poetry chapbook inspired by the chapters in Disability Visibility, etc.

Yellow trout lily, erythronium americanum. The trout lily is one of my favorite wildflowers. I like how they begin their days with their petals closed and heads nodding, petals curling up and backwards as they welcome sunshine throughout the day. #WildflowerPhotography #BloomScrolling #TroutLily