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In Every Ending, There Is a New Beginning
In May of last year, this blog launched in earnest. I set out to offer a vision of an ability-centered society, to combine academy and culture, to transform my story into ideas that someone somewhere might find useful, helpful, comforting, or appealing. I am proud of all that I have accomplished on these pages. However,…
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Definitions of Everyone: Reflection, Inclusion, and the Fusion of habilitation
What makes us human? Though there are many easy answers—bipedal apes who give live birth and care for their young until their teen years, users of tools and reason, beings that experience and articulate complex emotions—these responses, however, are at best superficial and all too often make space for the dehumanization of certain groups and…
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In Lieu of My Words
Dear reader, first off, an apology. This month’s post will be somewhat delayed. Though I do not wish to indulge in self-importance by imagining that these posts mark can’t miss moments on your monthly calendars, I do take pride in being consistent with publication and I do find comfort in the routine. I am sorry…
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Self-actualization in an Uncertain World
Lately my life has been one of parallelisms, funhouse reflections of decades past soaked in the shadow of memory. I find myself in an uncanny valley of repetition, in a hall of cracked mirrors, involuntarily engaged in a project of distorted reclamation of an idyllic past. As some of you may know, I have been…
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On Taylor Swift: genius, fandom, and ableism
Today I would like to start with a sweeping declaration: Taylor Swift is a genius. As sweeping declarations go this one should be uncontroversial. Should be. As a recording artist, her measurables are off the charts. In a career spanning nearly two decades and an array of genres she has sold over 200 million albums…
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Affirmative Action
At the end of June, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of the plaintiff in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (Harvard), effectively undoing affirmative action in higher ed. The court found race-based considerations in university admissions to be unconstitutional thereby overturning affirmative action in…
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Abiligogy
The human story is one of growth and discovery. New foraging grounds, new tools, new methods of cultivation, new iPhones. Humans have thus put a premium on knowledge of how to expand their abilities and empower themselves. Likewise, we have long held those who claim to have that knowledge in awed reverence. Figures like mystics,…
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Essence and Ability
We’re going to start off a bit differently today, dear reader. Instead of narrative or metaphor, I’m going to throw two rather academic definitions at you: Essence (noun): the totality of properties of a given phenomenon that when altered require us (whomever us may be phenomenologically) to agentially cut the phenomenon in question differently. Es-sense…
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Pizza Dough and Agential Cuts
Last month I left you with a cliffhanger, dear reader. We meditated on the iteratively unfolding enactment of sensemaking that is agency and about agential flows resolving into determinacy. That idea flows into a freeze frame, into perspectives etched in time, into agency realized, into a delicious metaphor: Dough. Squishy, gummy, elastic, puffy, dense, delightful,…
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Agency
There are things we have control over and things we don’t. There are ways we push the world and the way the world pushes us. This fundamental insight drives bits of folk wisdom like the serenity prayer. This fundamental insight is about agency. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,…