“Mommy, what is tenure?”: Growing Up in a Faculty Household
“Mommy, what is tenure?” is one of my first memories growing up because my father was often anxious and absent since he was on the track to a full professorship in the 1980s.
Author Posts
Posts from LPP authors.
Call to Action: Human Rights Defender Ruth López of Cristosal Is Imprisoned in El Salvador
The imprisonment of Ruth López should alarm everyone who believes in human rights and the rule of law. Ruth’s pretrial detention order is set to expire in June. Activism now is urgently needed to demand her unconditional release and prevent another extension.
Shucking Off the Shame, Stigma, and Silence that Surrounds Severe Mental Illness
People with severe mental illness are among the most marginalized people in America, many of them in prison or otherwise institutionalized and forgotten, others living on the street. All of them deserve care and respect.
How Lived Experience-Led Research Can Inform Public Hearings and Government Inquiries
The Australian Disability Royal Commission was conducted in early 2019 in response to damning reports about the continuing violence, abuse, neglect, and exploitation experienced by Australians with disability. There are five criteria that can potentially improve the likelihood of lived experience-led research informing public hearings and government inquiries.
When Lived Experience Becomes Evidence: Disability, Mental Health, and Institutional Erasure
Much of the existing research on disability and mental health is filtered through clinical, managerial, or policy-driven frameworks. These approaches prioritize outcomes, compliance, and recovery, often at the expense of understanding how harm is produced through everyday institutional practices.
Redefining Disability Through Everyday Life Experiences
Drawing on individual and everyday experience, even in the humanities and social sciences, remains an innovative approach – perhaps even more so in a field as specific as disability studies. Anne-Lyse Chabert makes a case for why we must give precedence above all else to the day-to-day experience of disabled individuals who reconstruct their relationship with the world in a different way.
The Sound of ‘Freedom’: Chinese Rock, Myth, and a Personal/Nation’s Search for Identity
How do music, media, ideologies, conventional knowledge, traditions, and the political economy shape our sense of identity – both at a personal level and as a nation? Dr. Lei (Nada) Peng found answers to these questions through the prism of Chinese rock music.
An Autistic and ADHD Journey: Re-writing a New Identity Post-Discovery
Book review of An Autistic-ADHD Journey: Building a True Identity Post-Discovery by Rachel Winder, reviewed by Dr. Nicholas Chown.
Between Survival and Empowerment: Refugee Women’s Entrepreneurship in Jordan and Lebanon
LPP authors Haya Al-Dajani, Maysa Baroud, and Deema Refai document the stories of Arab refugee women entrepreneurs who turn displacement into empowerment, and reveal the perils and pitfalls of refugee entrepreneurship.
Trading Bars: Prisons as De Facto Mental Institutions
Individuals with severe mental illness (SMI) have been barred from “polite” society throughout history. Many will eventually find their way to prison, behind a different set of bars, where there is little incentive to treat. Have we simply traded one form of confinement for another, even more cruel one?