So many of the metaphors we use that come from the body and bodily experience are ableist and predicated upon a notion of “normal.” In educational systems, that idea of “normal” has led to serious accessibility issues, to separate and unequal classrooms.
“When you look at the colonial system, one of the things they want to eradicate is the native language, because they don’t understand what’s going on and they can’t control it.”
An excerpt from The Rumpus Book Club‘s November selection, Inciting Joy by Ross Gay forthcoming from Algonquin Books on October 25, 2022 Subscribe by Octobet 15 to the Poetry Book…
Being disabled in higher education takes a psychic toll, whether you are faculty or a student. Yet most institutions do the bare minimum to remain “compliant” with the law rather than doing the work to make their spaces accessible and inclusive.
. . . to witness the world is always to participate in it, to make choices about what to see and what to ignore, and also to be worked upon by forces of differing scales.
Love can feel muddled, vast, diffuse; so little to do with the singular volatility of a firework. I hunger for that kind of crystalline precision, though. That clarity. To scream myself across the sky just once—consuming everything in my wake—and then vanish from view.