A bold and contemporary discourse of the intersection of disability studies and queer studies.Crip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of disability and queerness that are coming out all over. Both disability studies and queer theory are centrally concerned with how bodies, pleasures, and identities are represented as "normal" or as abject, but Crip Theory is the first book to analyze thoroughly the ways in which these interdisciplinary fie...

Facing threats like climate change and nuclear warfare, science fiction authors have conjured apocalyptic scenarios of human extinction. Can such gloomy fates help us make sense of our contemporary crises? How important is the survival of our species if we wind up battling for an Earth that has become an unhabitable hellscape? What other possible futures do narratives of the end of humanity allow us to imagine?Michael Bérubé explores the surprising insights of classic and contempor...

How an understanding of intellectual disability transforms the pleasures of readingNarrative informs everything we think, do, plan, remember, and imagine. We tell stories and we listen to stories, gauging their "well-formedness" within a couple of years of learning to walk and talk. Some argue that the capacity to understand narrative is innate to our species; others claim that while that might be so, the invention of writing then re-wired our brains.In T...

Undeniably iconoclastic, and doggedly practical where others were abstract, the late Richard Rorty was described by some as a philosopher with no philosophy. Rorty was skeptical of systems claiming to have answers, seeing scientific and aesthetic schools as vocabularies rather than as indispensable paths to truth. But his work displays a profound awareness of philosophical tradition and an urgent concern for how we create a society. As Michael Bérubé writes in his introduction to this new ...

How far does the idea of academic freedom extend to professors in an era of racial reckoning?The protests of summer 2020, which were ignited by the murder of George Floyd, led to long-overdue reassessments of the legacy of racism and white supremacy in both American academe and cultural life more generally. But while universities have been willing to rename some buildings and schools or grapple with their role in the slave trade, no one has yet asked the most uncom...

With the advent of the human genome, cloning, stem-cell research and many other developments in the way we think of the body, disability studies provides an entirely new way of thinking about the body in its relation to politics, the environment, the legal system, and global economies.Bending Over Backwards reexamines issues concerning the relationship between disability and normality in the light of postmodern theory and political activism. Davis takes up homosexuality, t...

This book is a lively, passionate defence of contemporary work in the humanities, and, beyond that, of the university system that makes such work possible. The book's stark accounts of academic labour, and its proposals for reform of the tenure system, are novel, controversial, timely, and very necessary.

What sorts of cultural criticism are teachers and scholars to produce, and how can that criticism be "employed" in the culture at large?In recent years, debates about the role and direction of English departments have mushroomed into a broader controversy over the public legitimacy of literary criticism. At first glance this might seem odd: few taxpayers and legislators care whether the nation's English professors are doing justice to the project of identifying the beautiful and the...

A nationally known scholar, essayist, and public advocate for the humanities, Michael Bérubé has a rapier wit and a singular talent for parsing complex philosophical, theoretical, and political questions. Rhetorical Occasions collects twenty-four of his major essays and reviews, plus a sampling of entries on literary theory and contemporary culture from his award-winning weblog.Selected to showcase the range of public writing available to scholars, the essays are grouped i...

The contributors to this collection explore why--and how--higher education in America under attack.

"A sensitive, sensible, and compelling account of American education at its best."—Philadelphia InquirerDescribed as one of the "101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" by right-wing critic David Horowitz, Michael Bérubé has become a leading liberal voice in the ongoing culture wars. This "smooth and swift read" (New Criterion) offers a definitive rebuttal of conservative activists' most incendiary claims about American universities, and in the p...

The story of Jamie Bérubé’s journey to adulthood and a meditation on disability in American lifePublished in 1996, Life as We Know It introduced Jamie Bérubé to the world as a sweet, bright, gregarious little boy who loves the Beatles, pizza, and making lists. When he is asked in his preschool class what he would like to be when he grows up, he responds with one word: big. At four, he is like many kids his age, but his Down syndrome prevents most people fr...