Episodes

  • Terry Baxter and Libby Coyner-Tsosie, "Stories on Skin: A Librarian's Guide to Tattoos as Personal Archives" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

    Terry Baxter and Libby Coyner-Tsosie, "Stories on Skin: A Librarian's Guide to Tattoos as Personal Archives" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
    Apr 28 2025
    Tattoos are not merely decorative; they contain deep meaning for individuals and communities. They document their wearers' personal histories and position in families or society, and they engage with a communal understanding of symbols.Stories on Skin: A Librarian's Guide to Tattoos as Personal Archives (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Terry Baxter & Libby Coyner-Tsosie makes the case that archivists who want to preserve as full a human story as possible must recognize the rich documentation provided by tattoos. It also argues, in a broader sense, that traditional archives are not representative of the ways human beings transmit information through time and that they must be augmented by other types of storytelling to provide a more complete record of our species.Baxter and Coyner-Tsosie touch on timely topics such as historical narratives, storytelling, cultural traditions, the body as a text, social control, and memorialization by considering tattoos as a personal and community archive. Discussing tattoos as a storytelling tool, the authors also challenge how history is kept and who gets included. Stories on Skin is committed to the rights of communities to tell their stories in their own way and to the power that right brings. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    54 mins
  • The Case for ASL Instruction for Hearing Heritage Signers

    The Case for ASL Instruction for Hearing Heritage Signers
    Apr 27 2025
    In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Emily Pacheco speaks with Associate Professor Su Kyong Isakson (Community College of Baltimore County, USA) about her 2018 paper, The Case for Heritage ASL Instruction for Hearing Heritage Signers. The conversation focuses on heritage signers, differentiated instruction, and sign language interpreter education. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    33 mins
  • Jina B. Kim, "Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing" (Duke UP, 2025)

    Jina B. Kim, "Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing" (Duke UP, 2025)
    Apr 12 2025
    In Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing (Duke UP, 2025), Jina B. Kim develops what she calls crip-of-color critique, bringing a disability lens to bear on feminist- and queer-of-color literature in the aftermath of 1996 US welfare reform and the subsequent evisceration of social safety nets. She examines literature by contemporary feminist, queer, and disabled writers of color such as Jesmyn Ward, Octavia Butler, Karen Tei Yamashita, Samuel Delany, and Aurora Levins Morales, who each bring disability and dependency to the forefront of their literary freedom dreaming. Kim shows that in their writing, liberation does not take the shape of the unfettered individual or hinge on achieving independence. Instead, liberation emerges by recuperating dependency, cultivating radical interdependency, and recognizing the numerous support systems upon which survival depends. At the same time, Kim demonstrates how theories and narratives of disability can intervene into state-authored myths of resource parasitism, such as the welfare queen. In so doing, she highlights the alternate structures of care these writers envision and their dreams of life organized around reciprocity and mutual support. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award Jina B. Kim is Assistant Professor of English and the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Smith College. Kim is a scholar, writer, and educator of feminist disability studies, queer-of-color critique, and contemporary multi-ethnic U.S. literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    53 mins
  • Mara Mills et al., "How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic" (NYU Press, 2025)

    Mara Mills et al., "How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic" (NYU Press, 2025)
    Mar 28 2025
    How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic is the first book to document the experiences of those hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City—disabled people. Diverse disability communities across the five boroughs have been disproportionately impacted by city and national policies, work and housing conditions, stigma, racism, and violence—as much as by the virus itself. Disabled and chronically-ill activists have protested plans for medical rationing and refuted the eugenic logic of mainstream politicians and journalists who “reassure” audiences that only older people and those with disabilities continue to die from COVID-19. At the same time, as exemplified by the viral hashtag #DisabledPeopleToldYou, disability expertise has become widely recognized in practices such as accessible remote work and education, quarantine, and distributed networks of support and mutual aid. How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press, 2025) charts the legacies of this “mass disabling event” for uncertain viral futures, exploring the dialectic between disproportionate risk and the creativity of a disability justice response. How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic includes contributions by wide-ranging disability scholars, writers, and activists whose research and lived experiences chronicle the pandemic’s impacts in prisons, migrant detention centers, Chinatown senior centers, hospitals in Queens and the Bronx, working from bed in Brooklyn, subways, schools, housing shelters, social media, and other locations of public and private life. By focusing on New York City over the course of three years, the book reveals key themes of the pandemic, including hierarchies of disability vulnerability, the deployment of disability as a tool of population management, and innovative crip pandemic cultural production. How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic honors those lost, as well as those who survived, by calling for just policies and caring infrastructures, not only in times of crisis but for the long haul. A full transcript of this interview is available at the link here Mara Mills is Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Mills is cofounder of the NYU Center for Disability Studies and coeditor of Crip Authorship: Disability as Method. Harris Kornstein is Assistant Professor of Public and Applied Humanities at the University of Arizona. They have published research and essays in Surveillance & Society, Curriculum Inquiry, Wired, and others. Faye Ginsburg is Kriser Professor of Anthropology at New York University. Ginsburg is cofounder of the NYU Center for Disability Studies and author of Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community and coauthor of Disability Worlds. Rayna Rapp is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at New York University, and the author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America and coauthor of Disability Worlds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 23 mins
  • Alisha Ali et al., "Mad Studies Reader: Interdisciplinary Innovations in Mental Health" (Routledge, 2024)

    Alisha Ali et al., "Mad Studies Reader: Interdisciplinary Innovations in Mental Health" (Routledge, 2024)
    Mar 26 2025
    The last few years have brought increased writings from activists, artists, scholars, and concerned clinicians that cast a critical and constructive eye on psychiatry, mental health care, and the cultural relations of mental difference. With particular focus on accounts of lived experience and readings that cover issues of epistemic and social injustice in mental health discourse, the Mad Studies Reader: Interdisciplinary Innovations in Mental Health (Routledge, 2024) brings together voices that advance anti-sanist approaches to scholarship, practice, art, and activism in this realm. Beyond offering a theoretical and historical overview of mad studies, this Reader draws on the perspectives, voices, and experiences of artists, mad pride activists, humanities and social science scholars, and critical clinicians to explore the complexity of mental life and mental difference. Voices from these groups confront and challenge standard approaches to mental difference. They advance new structures of meaning and practice that are inclusive of those who have been systematically subjugated and promote anti-sanist approaches to counter inequalities, prejudices, and discrimination. Confronting modes of psychological oppression and the power of a few to interpret and define difference for so many, the Mad Studies Reader asks the critical question of how these approaches may be reconsidered, resisted, and reclaimed. This collection will be of interest to mental health clinicians; students and scholars of the arts, humanities and social sciences; and anyone who has been affected by mental difference, directly or indirectly, who is curious to explore new perspectives. Bradley Lewis is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist with a background in the arts and humanities. He is Associate Professor at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and he is on the editorial board of the Journal of Medical Humanities. His books include Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry; Narrative Psychiatry: How Stories Can Shape Clinical Encounters; and Experiencing Epiphanies in Literature, Cinema, and Everyday Life (forthcoming). Alisha Ali is Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University. Her research focuses on the mental health effects of oppression, including violence, racism, discrimination, and trauma. She is the co-editor of the book Silencing the Self Across Cultures (Oxford University Press) as well as the co-editor of The Crisis of Connection (NYU Press). Jazmine Russell is the co-founder of the Institute for the Development of Human Arts (IDHA), a transformative mental health training institute, and host of Depth Work: A Holistic Mental Health Podcast. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of mad studies, critical psychology, and neuroscience, with experience working both within and outside the mental health system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    55 mins
  • The Audiobook's Century-Long Overnight Success

    The Audiobook's Century-Long Overnight Success
    Mar 24 2025
    Today we present the first episode of a miniseries on audiobooks by getting into the history and theory of the medium. Audiobooks are having a moment—and it only took them over a century to get here. Dr. Matthew Rubery, a Harvard PhD and Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London, pioneered the study of the audiobook, its history, and its affordances. Among his other works, Dr. Rubery is the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book (2016, Harvard University Press). He’s also the editor of Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (2011, Routledge). Matt’s latest book is titled Reader’s Block: A History of Reading Differences (2022, Stanford University Press). In this fascinating conversation, we discuss the long history of recorded literature; the weird shame around audiobook reading and its cultural roots; the interplay between disability, neurodivergence, and alternate forms of reading; and what an audiobook criticism might look like. And for our patrons, we’ll have our What’s Good segment at the end of the show, where Matt will tell us something good to read, something good to listen to. Something good to do. You can become a patron of the show at patreon.com/phantompower. Today’s show was edited by Mack Hagood. Transcription by Katelyn Phan. Music by Graeme Gibson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    52 mins
  • Shahd Alshammari, "Confetti and Ashes" (2025)

    Shahd Alshammari, "Confetti and Ashes" (2025)
    Mar 16 2025
    Shahd Alshammari’s Confetti and Ashes: Reflections on Wellness (Literary Mentor Words for Wellness, 2025) is a speculative memoir that questions what it means to live a good life. Blending personal experiences with the voices of ghosts and a seductive Qareen, this is a meditative exploration of consciousness and the liminal spaces we exist in. As a passionate Squash player, the narrator delves into the transformative power of sports. This lyrical narrative is genre-defying, refusing to adhere to conventional ways of narrating stories we carry within our bodies. Multi-layered and in many voices, this is a narrative of memory, disability, and movement. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy interviews Shahd Alshammari about her creative process, her personal journey with multiple sclerosis, as well as how her writings explore illness, wellness, and the search for meaning. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    29 mins
  • Zhiying Ma, "Between Families and Institutions: Mental Health and Biopolitical Paternalism in Contemporary China" (Duke UP, 2025)

    Zhiying Ma, "Between Families and Institutions: Mental Health and Biopolitical Paternalism in Contemporary China" (Duke UP, 2025)
    Mar 14 2025
    In contemporary China, people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses have long been placed under the guardianship of close relatives who decide on their hospitalization and treatment. Despite attempts at reforms to ensure patient rights, the 2013 Mental Health Law reinforced the family's rights and responsibilities. In Between Families and Institutions, Zhiying Ma examines how ideological, institutional, and technological processes shape families' complicated involvement in psychiatric care. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in psychiatric hospitals, community mental health teams, social work centers, and family support groups as well as interviews with policymakers and activists, Ma maps the workings of what she calls "biopolitical paternalism"--a mode of governance that sees vulnerable individuals as sources of risk, frames risk management as the state's paternalistic intervention, and shifts responsibilities for care and management onto families. Ma outlines the ethical tensions, intimate vulnerabilities in households, and health disparities across the population that biopolitical paternalism produces. By exploring these implications, Ma demonstrates the myriad ways biopower enables, inhibits, and transforms medical care in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 2 mins
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