An urgent and deeply affecting account of America's failure to provide meaningful support to its chronically ill and disabled citizens and our resulting reliance on the unpaid caregiving labor of spouses and intimate partners.When twenty-seven-year-old Laura Mauldin moved to New York for graduate school, she fell headlong into love. But just months into the relationship, her partner’s leukemia returned—and in a country without adequate systems for long-term care, L...

A mother whose child has had a cochlear implant tells Laura Mauldin why enrollment in the sign language program at her daughter’s school is plummeting: “The majority of parents want their kids to talk.” Some parents, however, feel very differently, because “curing” deafness with cochlear implants is uncertain, difficult, and freighted with judgment about what is normal, acceptable, and right. Made to Hear sensitively and thoroughly considers the structure and culture of the system...

An urgent and deeply affecting account of America's failure to provide meaningful support to its chronically ill and disabled citizens and our resulting reliance on the unpaid caregiving labor of spouses and intimate partners.When twenty-seven-year-old Laura Mauldin moved to New York for graduate school, she fell headlong into love. But just months into the relationship, her partner’s leukemia returned—and in a country without adequate systems for long-term care, L...

The COVID pandemic has shaken the material and social foundations of the world more than any event in recent history and has highlighted and exacerbated a longstanding crisis of care. While these challenges may be freshly visible to the public, they are not new. Over the last three decades, a growing body of care scholarship has documented the inadequacy of the social organization of care around the world, and the effect of the devaluation of care on workers, families, and communities. In ...

COVID-19 has once again illuminated the ways in which health risks and negative health outcomes are tied to economic and social inequalities. Disabled people rank among those most disadvantaged in terms of education, income, and social inclusion and this exacerbated their risk of negative pandemic-related outcomes. From the start, it was clear that disabled people would be disproportionately affected by the pandemic and this solidified as the pandemic unfolded.Disability in the...

Maclay School's Journal of Creative WritingOn our title: We take the title of this journal from a novella of the same name by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The novella is an existential piece, written before Dostoyevsky's greatest works and before Existentialism had really taken root in literature. The unnamed narrator is frequently named an anti-hero and is described by the note on the back of the Dover edition as a "profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-an...