The long-awaited essay collection from one of the most influential voices in disability activism that detonates a bomb in our collective understanding of care and illness, showing us that sickness is a fact of life. In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the p…

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Meryl Alper, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, about her recent book, Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age (MIT Press, 2023). In addition to being a professor, Alper is also an educational researcher who has worked over the past 20 year…

Fitter, Happier: The Eugenic Strain in Twentieth-Century Cancer Rhetoric (U Alabama Press, 2024) is a thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between cancer rhetoric, American ideals, and eugenic influences in the twentieth century. This groundbreaking work delves into the paradoxical interplay between acknowledging the genuine threat of …

-Is Brock Purdy an elite QB? -Davante Adams signs with the New York Jets -Buffalo Bills sign Amari CooperBy Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

-Can Bryce Young come back from his benching in Carolina? -Should Tua retire? -Kirk Cousins looks like the QB the Falcons paid forBy Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

-Is it time to panic in Atlanta? -DeShaun Watson faces more charges -Aaron Rodgers looks ok in NFL returnBy Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Raquel Velho, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, about her recent book, Hacking the Underground: Disability, Infrastructure, and London's Public Transport System (U Washington Press, 2023). Hacking the Underground provides a fascinating ethnographic …

In Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics (Duke UP, 2024), Jess Whatcott traces the link between US disability institutions and early twentieth-century eugenicist ideology, demonstrating how the legacy of those ideas continues to shape incarceration and detention today. Whatcott focuses on California, examining re…

-Is Josh Allen overrated? -Is this Bryce Young's prove it or lose it season? -The top 5 ranked NFL teams coming into the 2024 seasonBy Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

Creating a Person-Centered Library: Best Practices for Supporting High-Needs Patrons (Bloomsbury, 2023) provides a comprehensive overview of various services, programs, and collaborations to help libraries serve high-needs patrons as well as strategies for supporting staff working with these individuals. While public libraries are struggling to add…

-Steelers score only 3 points this offseason -Falcons sign Justin Simmons and Matthew Judon -Jayden Daniels, Bo Nix and Caleb Williams get starting QB jobsBy Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) by Dr. Heather Murray is a cultural and intellectual history of people with mental illnesses in the twentieth-century United States. While acknowledging the fraught, and often violent, histories of American psychiatric hospitals, Heath…

In this episode, Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with Dr Theodora Wildcroft, a researcher, anthropologist, and long-time teacher of what she calls “post-lineage yoga.” We discuss Theo's ethnographic research on yoga in the UK, focusing on its connections with animism, paganism, and other somatic practices. We also dive into Theo’s personal approach to…

Ella Houston's book Advertising Disability (Routledge, 2024) invites Cultural Disability Studies to consider how advertising, as one of the most ubiquitous forms of popular culture, shapes attitudes towards disability. The research presented in the book provides a much-needed examination of the ways in which disability and mental health issues are …

-Tyreek Hill and Tua Tagovailoa sign rich new contracts with Miami -Brandon Aiyuk trade rumors heat up -Snoop is the big winner at the 2024 Paris OlympicsBy Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

Emily Pacheco speaks with Professor Jemina Napier (Heriot-Watt University, Scotland) about her book, Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). The conversation focuses on child and sign language brokering, the innovative methodology Dr. Napier employed in her study, and the impacts of researching sign language bro…

Fella Benabed's book Applied Global Health Humanities: Readings in the Global Anglophone Novel (de Gruyter, 2024) highlights the importance of global Anglophone literature in global health humanities, shaping perceptions of health issues in the Global South and among minorities in the Global North. Using twelve novels, it explores the historical, p…

-Is it gold or bus for the 2024 US men's basketball team? -Can the Canadian and French basketball teams compete with US at the olympics this year? -How does the 2024 Olympic team compare to the 1992 Dream team?By Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

In 1967, the US government funded the National Theatre of the Deaf, a groundbreaking rehabilitation initiative employing deaf actors. This project aligned with the postwar belief that transforming bodies, minds, aesthetics, and institutions could liberate disabled Americans from economic reliance on the state, and demonstrated the growing belief th…

-Is Bronny James an NBA player? -Should the 49ers trade Brandon Aiyuk? -The Giants are going all in on Daniel Jones. Is that the right decision?By Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

-Is Brandon Ingram worth a $200 million dollar contract? -With Mikal Bridges added are the Knicks the team to beat in the East? -Are you surprised Donovan Mitchell re-signed with Cavaliers? -With DeMar DeRozan gone to the Kings is it rebuild time in Chicago?By Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

Mental health care and its radical possibilities reimagined in the context of its global development under capitalism. The contemporary world is oversaturated with psychiatric programs, methods, and reforms promising to address any number of "crises" in mental health care. When these fail, alternatives to the alternatives simply pile up and seem to…

Movements that take issue with conventional understandings of autism spectrum disorder, a developmental disability, have become increasingly visible. Drawing on more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with participants, Dr. Catherine Tan investigates two autism-focused movements, shedding new light on how members contest expe…

-Dejounte Murray traded to the New Orleans Pelicans -NBA Draft convo -2024 NBA Free Agency beginsBy Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

John T. Maier's The Disabled Will: A Theory of Addiction (Routledge Press, 2024) defends a comprehensive new vision of what addiction is and how people with addictions should be treated. The author argues that, in addition to physical and intellectual disabilities, there are volitional disabilities - disabilities of the will - and that addiction is…

While many live-action films portray disability as a spectacle, "crip animation" (a genre of animated films that celebrates disabled people's lived experiences) uses a variety of techniques like clay animation, puppets, pixilation, and computer-generated animation to represent the inner worlds of people with disabilities. Crip animation has the pot…

-2024 NBA Finals discussed -Did Boston have the easiest path to a championship -Are the top money making teams the best teams in the NBA?By Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

If you’ve ever worked with dementia patients before, you know how unique and bizarre the experience can be, and how little the stereotypes actually hold up to the experience. Even knowing about the diagnosis often does little to help us in caring for people, and many caregivers find themselves getting sucked into behavioral loops of their own. This…

Season Two erupts in our ears with a film-noir soundscape—an eerie voice utters strange and disjointed phrases and echoing footsteps lead to sirens and gunshots. What on Earth are we listening to? We unravel the mystery with NYU media professor Mara Mills who studies the historical relationship between disability and media technologies. In Episode …

-Jalen Rose has a warning for NBA players -What is the most interesting storyline for the 2024 NBA Finals? -Is it time to trade Trae Young?By Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

Emily Pacheco speaks with writer and researcher Jessica Kirkness about her memoir, The House with All the Lights on: Three Generations, One Roof, a Language of Light (Allen & Unwin, 2023). Jessica has published in Meanjin and The Conversation, as well as other outlets. Her PhD focused on the ‘hearing line’: the invisible boundary between Deaf and h…

In Disability Worlds (Duke UP, 2024), Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp chronicle and theorize two decades of immersion in New York City’s wide-ranging disability worlds as parents, activists, anthropologists, and disability studies scholars. They situate their disabled children’s lives among the experiences of advocates, families, experts, activists, a…

In this episode we debate which player under 25 will be the next face NBABy Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

During the COVID pandemic, billions of dollars in relief aid was sent out to help us ride out the storm, although many people who struggled through it might scratch their heads at such a number, having seen little of it make any concrete impact in their own lives. This discrepancy is indicative of the underlying problem with the contemporary care e…

What does an inclusive society look like? And what are the challenges and opportunities when the society in question, Timor-Leste, is one of the most resource-constrained in Southeast Asia? My guest today is interested in these questions of inclusion and participation, and argues that people with a disability are a key component of a truly inclusiv…

In this episode we debate Lebron, KD and Steph's chances of winning another championshipBy Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

A powerful analysis and call to action that reveals disability as one of the defining features of environmental devastation and resistance. Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (U California Press, 2024) tells the stor…

In Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines (Duke UP, 2023), Sony Coráñez Bolton examines the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines. Drawing on literature, poetry, colonial records, political essays, travel narratives, and visual culture, Coráñez Bolton trac…

We debate who should be the 2024 NBA MVPBy Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

-Should the Falcons have drafted Michael Penix Jr 8th overall? -2024 NFL Draft gradesBy Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

In this episode we debate if Matt Ryan is a Hall of Fame worthy QBBy Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

Measurements, and their manipulation, have been underestimated as crucial historical forces motivating and guiding the way we think about disability. Using measurement technology as a lens, and examining in particular the measurement of hearing and breathing, Coreen McGuire's book Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal: Setting the Standards for Di…

-NBA Playoffs begin -Season Grades for 2024 NBA seasonBy Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

-Who won Stefon Diggs trade? -Which team would trade their superstar for Victor WembanyamaBy Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

In Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life (Duke University Press, 2024), Margaret Price intervenes in the competitive, productivity-focused realm of academia by sharing the everyday experiences of disabled academics. Drawing on more than three hundred interviews and survey responses, Price demonstrates that individual …

We grade the Free Agent moves made in the NFL so far for the 2024 season. We'll release an update after the draft.By Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

In this Mt Rushmore episode we talk about our favorite NBA streetball players with the following criteria ◦They could have have won a title or not ◦Can be a player during or before your lifespan ◦Can include a fifth/off to the side of the mountain playerBy Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton

Mimi Khúc is a PhD, writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is currently the Co-Editor of The Asian American Literary Review and an adjunct lecturer in Disability Studies at Georgetown University. Her work includes Open in Emergency, a hybrid book-arts project decolonizing Asian American mental health; the Asian American Tarot, a reimagi…

The use of disability as a metaphor is ubiquitous in popular culture – nowhere more so than in the myths, stereotypes and tropes around blindness. To be 'blind' has never referred solely to the inability to see. Instead blindness has been used as shorthand for, among other things, a lack of understanding, immorality, closeness to death, special ins…

-The NBA second half of the season -Trae Young injured. Is it time to tank? -NFL Draft convoBy Reggie Johnson and Eugene Morton