Translating to Plain Language, an Important Part of Disability Equity

By Julia Watts Belser Image credit: Mohamed Hassan Ever since I began writing Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole, I knew I wanted to craft a plain language version. The book brings disability culture into conversation with Jewish and Christian traditions, inviting readers to explore how disability insights can transform

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Teaching Black and Asian American Solidarity in the Classroom

By Brian Batugo Student posters celebrating Black and Asian American solidarity. Photo credit: Brian Batugo   Asian American history must be included in the broader context of US history, especially given the increase in hate crimes and incidents resulting from xenophobic and racist rhetoric that falsely blamed the Asian American community for the coronavirus. Catherine

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Our Flag on the High Seas Means Rebellion: Pirate Culture in Pop Culture

By: Gabel Strickland   “More than a little like Robin Hood, the mythic outlaw but friend of the people who has endured like no other figure in the English language, the pirates—to simplify an exceedingly complex category—have been a natural for popularization and romanticization. They exist beyond the margins of law and order. They boast

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Read Kyle T. Mays’ Author Note for An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Afro-Indigenous historian, Kyle T. Mays argues that the foundations of the US are rooted in antiblackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions continue into the present. He explores how Black and Indigenous peoples have always resisted and struggled

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On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Read an Exerpt from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s New Book Not “A Nation of Immigrants”

Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, will say proudly that we are a nation of immigrants. In this bold new book, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts this ideology is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the US’s history of settler

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With Her Historical Epic Palmares, Gayl Jones Makes Her Long-Awaited Literary Return

It was a long wait before Gayl Jones broke her years of silence. When Toni Morrison first discovered her, she said “no novel about any Black woman could ever be the same after this” upon reading the manuscript for Corregidora. It was published in 1975 when Jones was twenty-six. She followed up her debut novel with Eva’s

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Higher Education Must Be Decolonized Through Study and Struggle: A Q&A With Leigh Patel, author of No Study Without Struggle

  An inconvenient truth lies beneath the promises of opportunity and prestige that higher education degrees offer. US academic institutions are built upon legacies of stolen labor on stolen land. Through history, this settler-colonial foundation has trapped us in history and perpetuated race, class, and gender inequalities on campus. Social protests, often led by youth,

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In The Water Defenders, Victory Reminds Us That Water Is More Precious Than Gold

  Left: Robin Broad; right: John Cavanagh   In the early 2000s, many people in El Salvador were at first excited by the prospect of jobs, progress, and prosperity that the Pacific Rim mining company promised. However, farmer Vidalina Morales, brothers Marcelo and Miguel Rivera, and others soon discovered that the river system supplying water

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