University of Michigan Press Blog

2011 University of Michigan Press Book Award Winner Announced

The University of Michigan Press recently named Tobin Siebers, author of Disability Aesthetics, the recipient of the 2011 University of Michigan Press Book Award. The first attempt to theorize the representation of disability in modern art and visual culture, Disability Aesthetics explores the rich but hidden role that disability plays in art and in aesthetic judgments.

The Press Book Award is given to the best work published by the University Press in the prior two calendar years and written by a member, or members, of the University of Michigan faculty.

UM Press offers new way for people with print disabilities to read its books

The University of Michigan Press (UM Press), long a provider of books in audio and other alternative formats, has signed a new agreement with Bookshare, a global leader in providing copyrighted, digital accessible books to people with print disabilities. The agreement will increase the number of formats UM Press makes available to the millions of Americans who have print disabilities and give even more people the opportunity to read UM Press books.

Under the agreement, UM Press titles will be included in the Bookshare library. Bookshare will convert electronic versions of UM Press books into digital text (for use with text-to-speech) as well as digital braille. These formats can be used for large print and digital audio. The titles are provided free of charge and the university will receive no revenues.

“We’ve always had a commitment at the Press to making our books accessible to as many readers as possible,” said Karen Hill, Associate Director and Digital Manager. “With this agreement, more than fifty Press titles are available immediately in easy, accessible formats as part of a Bookshare subscription, with many more to come.”

“UM Press titles will increase the academic and scholarly content available in Bookshare,” said Betsy Beaumon, Vice President and General Manager of the Literacy Program at Benetech, the nonprofit organization that operates Bookshare. “With the growth of academic content, more and more qualified college and graduate students are finding the books they need for their studies in Bookshare.”

Author Annie Lehmann speaks out on Autism Awareness Month

Annie Lehmannn is author of The Accidental Teacher: Life Lessons from My Silent Son. She wrote this essay in honor of Autism Awareness Month, April 2011.

Parents raising children with autism are on the front lines every day, navigating a sea of unique challenges, emotions and bureaucracies. Yet when it comes to autism education, the parental perspective tends to be overlooked.  Parents have a great deal to contribute and getting professionals to appreciate this was one of the reasons I wrote The Accidental Teacher: Life Lessons from my Silent Son. 
 
During the 20 plus years chronicled in this book we tried every intervention available. Still when our son Jonah reached adulthood, he remained severely impaired.  
 
Over the years there was frustration and anger at his lack of progress.  There were (Individualized Education Plan) IEPs where we sat across from the teachers and professionals who knew Jonah well and cared about him, but resented our questions and upset.  As well trained as they were about how to teach children with autism, keep records and write an IEP, they never fully appreciated what we, as parents, faced on a 24/7 basis.  
 

Inside Higher Ed piece by 'Mad at School' author is on scholarly job hunt for those with mental disabilities

Margaret Price, author of Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, recently had a piece in Inside Higher Ed on how difficult the academic job search process can be for those with mental disabilities and how it might become more accessible.

"If this system were revised to become more accessible for academics with mental disabilities, all members of the academic world would benefit," she wrote. "A few relatively simple changes would have dramatic impact."

The full article is available online.

Price has been in the news recently, with a story about her work appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education and a blog response of her own to discussions about mental disabilities in an academic setting.

'Mad At School' author responds to debate over mental disability on campus

This blog entry, written by Mad at School author Margaret Price, is the second of three posts on mental disabilities in the college setting. For the first post on the Chronicle of Higher Education story, please click here.

Killer Dichotomies: Ir/rational, Crazy/Sane, Dangerous/Not

There are a number of conversations about Mad at School going on now. I am happy to see all of them—even those that contain opinions I strongly disagree with—because at least we are now having this conversation.

Over the past week, I’ve been reading Benjamin Reiss’s "Campus Security and the Specter of Mental-Health Profiling," along with its comment stream; also comments on Facebook; and other conversations on listservs such as DS-HUM.

And while I am not a fan of dichotomies—those “killer dichotomies,” in Anne Berthoff’s wonderful phrase—I do think I am beginning to perceive a divide.

On one side are those who have some direct experience or knowledge of mental disability. These folks include clinical psychologists or mental-health administrators on campus. They include professors who live with major depression, or bipolar disorder—or some other lurid diagnosis—carefully, and in secret. They may include teachers who have walked a crying student to the campus mental-health center. This group includes those who have a loved one—a brother or sister, a child, a close friend—who experiences significant mental health distress.

These people, in my experience, understand that mental health, mental unhealth, and the torturous framework of diagnosis, money, and human rights that lurches along with these concepts, are vastly complicated. Empirical studies tell us that many of our students, many of our faculty colleagues, we ourselves, are mentally disabled in large numbers. This group is interested in finding ways to improve access to all kinds of spaces, including academe.

Students and faculty with mental disabilities find their privacy under fire; new book, Chronicle of Higher Education story cover the issue

Mental disability is a topic of fast-growing interest in all spheres of American culture, including popular, governmental, aesthetic, and academic. Margaret Price's Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life explores the contested boundaries between disability, illness, and mental illness in the setting of U.S. higher education. Scholar and disabilities activist Margaret Price asks: How might our education practices change if we understood disability to incorporate the disabled mind?

In an article published by The Chronicle of Higher Education, professor and author Benjamin Reiss writes, "Margaret Price makes clear in her book, Mad at School, influential voices are arguing that we should try to get around the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act regulations, which protect the privacy of student education records, in order to monitor and sequester potentially 'dangerous' students."

UM Press titles win CHOICE Awards

CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, which is published by the Association of College and Research Libraries and a division of the American Library Association, has announced the winners of its 2010 Outstanding Academic Titles winners.

The following University of Michigan Press titles have received the award:

  David Castillo's Baroque Horrors

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pamela Fox's Natural Acts

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joshua Horwitz and Casey Anderson's Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea

 

 

 

 

 

Suk-Young Kim's Illusive Utopia

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tobin Siebers's Disability Aesthetics

New Open Text Project begins, allowing free reading and comments on books

In honor of National Autism Awareness Month in April, The University of Michigan Press is pleased to announce its first-ever Open Text Project book, allowing both free viewing and comments by readers on the paragraph level online.

Annie Lehmann’s son Jonah was born with severe autism, leaving her determined to do something about it. Over the years, the family tried numerous methods to help Jonah, most of which ended in disappointment. But as Lehmann writes in The Accidental Teacher, that journey became a path of self-discovery for the family, paved with both frustrations and triumphs.

That book is available in its entirety to view online for a limited time by visiting www.press.umich.edu/autismmemoir. Using a platform designed by digress.it, readers can leave comments at the individual paragraph level, respond to others’ comments, and generally use the book as a springboard to meaningful discussions about autism and parenting.

This is the first Open Text Project title published by The University of Michigan Press, but won’t be the last. This platform can be used to solicit public comments from general readers on a work already published, as in this case, or private expert opinion on books still in progress.

The Accidental Teacher is available for sale as well in cloth, paper, and e-book versions.

Sins Invalid Interview: Terry Rowden

Sins Invalid’s Leroy Moore recently interviewed Terry Rowden, an Assistant Professor of English at the City University of New York, Staten Island. Terry is the author of The Songs of Blind Folk: African American Musicians and the Cultures of Blindness and coeditor of Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader.

Leroy of Sins Invalid: As a Black professor and author teaching and writing on topics of popular culture, transnational cinema and philosophy, do you have a personal connection to what you teach and write about? Please give some background on why you teach and write on subjects that you do.

Terry Rowden: My interest in disability emerged primarily from within my teaching and research interests in African American and queer literature once I began to realize that all marginalized social identities reproduce to some extent the dynamics of disability as both a social construct and a lived condition. Disability has a special force as a means of rewriting normalizing narratives because it occurs across all social groups and categories. My overall project as a scholar is to reveal that abnormality is really just a political construct used to ground social hierarchies. For instance, all people who live into advanced old age, simply for that reason alone, will eventually experience some lessening of physical functioning significant enough to remove them

Struggling with research? You're not the only one...

In Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have, Eszter Hargittai explores the frustration, uncertainty, and challenges that many social scientists face in the course of their research. The collection of essays aims to fill the notable gap in the existing literature on research methods in the social sciences. While the methods literature is extensive, rarely do authors discuss the practical issues and challenges they routinely confront in the course of their research projects. As a result, each new cohort is forced to reinvent the wheel, making mistakes that previous generations have already confronted and resolved. Research Confidential seeks to address this failing by supplying new researchers with the kind of detailed practical information that can make or break a given project.

Eszter Hargittai is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

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