Today’s quote comes to us from Dr. tanja aho, who currently is a Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at American University.
Here is his self-description:
“I teach classes focused on disability and madness, settler colonialism and racial capitalism, and gender and sexuality. I am currently exploring a new project tentatively titled Queer³: Intersections of Spectrums, which would focus on the overlapping experiences of queerness, genderqueerness, and neuroqueerness. My work on madness/disability, political economy, and popular culture has been published in several anthologies as well as in American Quarterly, Lateral, and the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies. In 2015 I served as the interim managing editor of the Disability Studies Quarterly and from 2015-18 as the co-chair of ASA’s Critical Disability Studies Caucus.
“I am also working on a manuscript, “Autism, Anxiety, and Neuroqueerness: A Mad Critique of Political Economy,” which uses a crip of color materialist approach to intervene in the current academic (re)turn to political economy that has often focused on neoliberalism as an explanatory paradigm and a field of adversity. Analyzing a range of discursive sites—from radical left manifestos and so-called neoliberal literature to pop psychology and the sharing economy—I challenge current discourses of political economy to move from their focus on neoliberalism to the co-constitution of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and liberal democracy by investigating ongoing investments in rationality and their concomitant pathologization of intensity. More specifically, I investigate how these anti-neoliberal discourses employ contemporary racialized conceptualizations of madness and mental illness in order to showcase how the psychiatrization of mental states reflects liberal investments that remain dominant in knowledge production in the humanities.”
FYI: American University currently costs about $70,000 a year ($55,000 tuition, $15,000 room and board).
Would you pay $70,000….or, for that matter, $70 or $.70…to have your child “educated” by this woman (at least I think aho is a woman, I’m genuinely not sure of how she/he self-characterizes and, as you can see, American University won’t tell us).
I award tanja aho Quote Of The Day honors for giving us such a clear insight into what’s wrong with so many of our major colleges and universities these days, and how far from anything even remotely mainstream the “education” they are providing is.
