Disability Rhetoric

From your beloved friend, honorable man, dearest of scientific minds who exist on the liberal plain.

To the dearest Readers, Beloved in all forms and municipalities.

Greetings.

It is a requirement of this academic course on disability rhetoric that I present to this humble assemblage, an account of my experience of this course over the last three months. This is not a comprehensive look into the entirety of my time involved in this course, but rather a qualitative look back into the nature of the topics involved, the intellectuals I had the pleasure of interacting with, both in written, virtual, and physical forms. This should be an exhilerating experiance for all peoples involved, so let us digest the following info.

I was not certain about a lot of the experiences I would gain from this class; it was very little comfort that I was the only male of my species, the genus homo discipulus, in my course. It was some small relief that my teacher was the only male of his respective species, Homo Lectoris, so we could convalesce on our shared experiance of being the only ones of our kinds as he navigated me through his home planet, Panepistimio-Taxi.

It was a topic that I had an interesting, having had a brother with moderately severe autism, but was not particularly knowledgeable about. I found the professors lectures style was very engaging, using multiple forms of media to engage with the students in different ways. The videos where definitely interesting, with films such as “Crip Camp” and “Sins Invalid” (Which I have to admit, was difficult to watch for me – the only time I felt uncomfortable in class). The text, Disability Visibility was a very interesting collection of short essays and stories from different disabled people from different perspectives and backgrounds, and I thought it was fascinating. My favorite was Blind Astronomer Finds a Way to Hear the Stars, which talked about disabled scientists in the scientific community. This essay inspired me to look into disability in my field, which is Chemistry. I’ve also thought the academic papers where interesting, though I often didn’t have that much time to read through them all the way. Much of the discussion on these papers did help with catching up with anything I missed though.

Learning about how disability affects society, personal relationships, thoughts, academia, etcetera, was very fascinating. It gave me a few ideas on how to become the new dictator of this new world. But other than that, I thought this class was extremely thought provoking, especially on my biases and opinions, and I definitely involved into a more advanced disciple.

Sincerely,

Future lord of the universe.