youtube

“Academic Ableism” Author Interview–Part 2

by Kathryn Beaton December 15, 2017

Check out Part 2 of our interview with Jay Timothy Dolmage. He’s an Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo and author of the newly released book Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education, which argues that inclusiveness allows for a better education for everyone. We are proud to offer a large selection of disability studies books, and feel that they are essential to dispelling misconceptions. Find Part 1 of the interview here. You write about how, for many years, “disability has been constructed as the antithesis of higher education, often positioned as a distraction, a drain, a problem to […]

Fulcrum e-Reader Featured in New Video

by Charles Watkinson September 30, 2017

A video posted on YouTube shows the Fulcrum e-reader in action for the first time. Fulcrum is a new platform being developed at Michigan to present monographic source materials in close connection to the narratives they support. The book used to demonstrate the new e-reader is Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and other Media Paratexts by Jonathan Gray, a title originally published by New York University Press in print and commercial ebook form in 2010 and recently made available by the publisher as an open access title. As befits a volume about the media industry, the original book referenced many […]

Seeing Beyond Amazing: Is Sesame Street really changing the way we understand autism?

by Sam Killian December 14, 2015

This is a guest post by Anne McGuire, author of the University of Michigan Press forthcoming title, War on Autism. Seeing Beyond Amazing: Is Sesame Street really changing the way we understand autism? The Sesame Workshop, the non-profit educational organization behind Sesame Street, made international headlines and lit up social media last month with the introduction of its newest Muppet character, Julia. With wispy orange hair and bright green eyes, Julia is, according to Sesame: “a preschool girl with autism who does things a little differently when playing with her friends.” Julia is more than a just another person in the neighbourhood, […]

Publishing, Poetry, and the Future: Reflecting on the 2015 Bear River Writers’ Conference

by Allison Peters July 27, 2015

The weekend May sprung into June, I attended the 2015 Bear River Writers’ Conference at Camp Michigania up on Walloon Lake (where Ernest Hemingway used to spend his summers as a kid), 250 miles north of Ann Arbor, a little south of Petoskey. Sponsored by the University of Michigan Department of English, Bear River is rich with writing workshops, readings, panels (often related to publishing), and craft talks. Directed by University of Michigan faculty member and poet Keith Taylor, the annual conference—now in its fifteenth year—is regularly attended by some of the University’s most prestigious creative writing faculty as well […]

John Oliver on the NCAA

by Phillip Witteveen March 25, 2015

In its most recent episode, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver did some muckraking on the controversies of “amateur” student-athletics; as one of his rapid-fire segments, Oliver reported: “Fun fact: The very first executive director of the NCAA stated that he ‘crafted’ the term ‘student-athlete’ in the 1950s, explicitly to avoid worker’s comp for injured athletes. And 60 years later, that term is still working.” That “very first executive director” was Walter Byers, during whose long tenure (’51 – ’87), the NCAA became a multi-million dollar commercial enterprise (with, for example, 68.2 million on the table for televising the NCAA’s ’88 basketball season). In this way, Byers has had a far-reaching influence in […]

← Previous Entries