Real quick up top: I’m now giving all my Substack income to help Ghazal and her family flee Gaza. In June 2024, we raised $91.72! Thank you so much to my paid subscribers! If you want to help too, consider upgrading to the paid tier; if you do, you’ll get four hot takes per month instead of two!
Last week, I went to Portland, Oregon for the 2024 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Conference. I then spent an extra four days in Portland, since I pretty much never get to experience the cities I travel to for work! This post will mostly contain pictures of my trip, plus some musings on traveling while disabled. Happy Disability Pride Month, by the way!
The ASEE Conference is devoted to presentations on engineering education research, more broadly referred to as the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). As someone who chose the academic, non-tenure track life of a Lecturer, I don’t do traditional STEM research (sorry to all the queer students who email me with the intent of “joining my lab”), but I am trying to “pivot” into this research area. Much of the work in the STEM SoTL space is related to newer instructional methods (e.g., experimental types of active learning, engaging diverse learning styles), frameworks for curriculum design, and even discussions on how to make life for STEM teachers more equitable.
My main concern about engineering education is that, no matter how much we incorporate “progressive” teaching styles that can “engage more types of students”, the content of the course material will always be beholden to capitalist interest. In other words, having a flipped classroom, using think-pair-share, or even taking bolder moves like admitting more women and students of color will be moot if those students are ultimately being trained to work for Big Oil or war profiteers, thus maintaining the power relations that keep those students marginalized in the first place. So I was delighted to find a number of talks related to actually changing the curriculum: discussing human-centered design, incorporating social good as a sustainability metric, and even a bell hooks-inspired keynote about bringing love into technology education from ASU’s Brooke Coley.
The most valuable talks I attended were the Chemical Engineering Division talks, as they focused heavily on laboratory education (which I will be taking on next Spring) and sustainability education. One of my long-term goals at UMass is to create a Sustainability concentration within my major (or perhaps a Certificate, or a Minor…still figuring that out), so hearing from other educators about how they implemented such a curriculum was very insightful! I’ll definitely be taking this advice back to my department!
The conference was also a great chance to reconnect with some friends, including the amazing Julie Johnston, Emily Lawson-Bulten (who brought me out to UIUC for the WeSTEM Conference), and my Chemical Engineering peers! <3
And now we get to the fun part: how did I spent a week solo-vacationing in a large city despite being disabled? As my readers know by now, I’ve been disabled (seemingly from Long COVID) since Fall 2022 and have been a cane user since May 2023. You may not know that I’ve been in physical therapy for the past few months, which has been a game changer in terms of how I feel in my body.
In this strange interim phase of recovery, I learn what my body is capable of every single day. My ability to walk can vary even moment to moment: there were times at the conference when I was hobbling around, barely able to move from one room to another, and other times where I circumnavigated the entire Oregon Convention Center with no need for my cane. I’ve found it necessary to keep a large variety of items on me at all times: my collapsible cane, medications (including ibuprofen, which is my current Oh My God I Need Something Extra Right Now pill), plenty of water, sunglasses, hand sanitizer, extra KN95 masks, and more. The cross-body bag in which I held these contents was, at times, cumbersome to carry around, but the alternatives (of not being able to move or getting sick again) made this cost more than worth it.
There’s another thing: for a conference full of people who are devoted to the craft of science education and even “engineering ethics” there were remarkably few people wearing masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the disease that continues to kill thousands per month and which likely disabled me in the first place. I’ve learned not to be disappointed by most people on this issue, especially when I myself occasionally dipped my mask down to take sips of water or have a quick bite of food (I aim to eat outside or in private as much as possible), but seeing this behavior from people with PhDs in STEM fields was pretty off-putting. After all, the entire part of a conference is to network, which usually involves getting close to people and shaking hands, so it’s pretty isolating to have to distance yourself others as much as possible when doing so. I say bring back mask mandates so people like me can do our jobs!
I will say that I was very satisfied with Portland, Oregon’s public transportation system. After three full days of conferencing, I was able to make it to my short-term rental (I booked an Airbnb before realizing that it’s a BDS target!! From now on I’m finding another site!) with ease. From where I stayed, there was a queer-friendly coffee shop and some lovely food trucks in short walking distance, plus bus and tram lines on which a mere tap of my credit card could take me all over the city. While far from perfect—I can’t imagine making this trip while being a wheelchair user—the vast majority of my vacation destinations involved a <5 minute walk to a bus or streetcar and a measly $2.80 payment.
These destinations included the Portland Japanese Garden (which does have a shuttle service that brings you up the small mountain from the ticket desk to the actual park), Powell’s Books, and Hopscotch (a neat interactive art installation)!
I am incredibly grateful for the Everywhere Is Queer app, which shows all the queer-owned businesses in the country. Just look at all the locations in Portland alone! With this, I was able to find Top Of The Line Games, a trans-owned gaming store, and Speed-O Cappuccino, a sex worker-owned food truck with incredible vegan corn dogs! The latter even put me onto a Cupcake Girls maker’s market on Saturday, where I bought a stuffy from Gay Crochet and some other great art pieces!
My last disability travel finding: paying extra to sit in exit seats on my flight home was an absolute game changer; those extra few inches of leg room made it so that I could flex my legs as needed and didn’t leave the plane barely able to walk. It made me briefly wonder why plane manufacturers don’t simply remove one or two rows of seats so that everybody on the flight could have an extra few inches, until I remembered “oh right, money”; for corporations, it’s not about comfort so much as making as much money per flight as possible. I wonder if there’s room in the market for an airline that specifically markets itself as “the one where everybody flies first-class”. There’s also probably something to be said about the ruling class’ desire for prioritization above everyone else to give themselves an inflated sense of importance; similar to the issue of leg room, while it would be more efficient to board the plane in any other fashion but front-to-back, the ability to board first and witness The Poors walk past you must have some next-level psycho-sexual effect on the rich.
That’s all I have this week, other than the usual digest below. I hope you enjoyed this travel blog, stay tuned next week for an actual hot take!
Currently Reading
During my trip to Portland (specifically while waiting in airports or flying), I also read three entire books. How can vacation be fun without reading about systemic injustices? The first was “Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture” by Sherronda J. Brown. This book seems like it was made specifically for me, a person who devotes her time to rigorously detailing the connections between seemingly-disparate forms of bigotry through a critical science lens. Brown recounts the medicalization of asexuality and it’s association with inferiority, and puts it in conversation with the reproductive roles placed on women, the hypersexualization (and thus animalization) of Black people, and other forms of scientific bigotry. It may very well be my new favorite book of all time, but I’d like to let that opinion simmer for a while before allowing it to dethrone “Braiding Sweetgrass”. Check back in December for my annual “best of” list.
My next travel read was “Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination” by Sarah Schulman. Here, the famous ACT UP activist walks through her anecdotal experience of the loss of queer spaces, art, and radical aspirations following the AIDS crisis. She makes a compelling case for AIDS as a sort of nexus point after which our community’s political goals seemed more assimilationist than norm-challenging, which hits hard as someone who’s as privy to frivolous online discourse as I am. The more I learn about the 1987-1993 ACT UP actions, the more radicalized I become against the Internet as a tool for enacting political goals. More on that in a future post…
Finally, I read “Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary”. This series of interviews, for me, confirmed the idea that very little has changed in terms of trans progress since Stonewall. In fact, the opening pages of this book challenge our mythology of Stonewall as this huge, society-shifting uprising; to living legend Miss Major, it was just another police raid. Cisgender gays were already excluding trans people at Pride marches the following year (1970), and the material conditions for the most marginalized—Black trans women who do survival sex work—may as well be the same in 2024 as they were in the ’60s. After all, for most queer and trans sex workers, police raids never stopped, and getting a “real” job is just as difficult. I’m so grateful to be alive at the same time as Miss Major.
Watch History
An incredible introduction to the idea of gender abolition (and abolition in general) by a creator I truly can’t believe I’ve never heard of, M* Birkholz.
A hilarious breakdown of the world of gay animals, and what they mean for homosexuality in humans.
A thought-provoking take on why musicians aren’t speaking up about Palestine, from someone inside the music industry.
An informative look into Indigenous food sovereignty, and how a marginalized group has been denied access to their traditions.
Bops, Vibes, & Jams
To be honest, I’ve just been bumping that new Charli XCX album for the past three weeks. Favorite tracks: all of them. Every single one.
In case you missed it, “Not Like Us” now has a music video, which even features what could be a peek at a new dance-worthy Kendrick song!!
And now, your weekly Koko.
That’s all for now! See you next week with more sweet, sweet content.
In solidarity,
-Anna