Dean Spade Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• I went to law school which is a 3-year program in the US that is focused primarily on memorizing certain doctrines and taking exams that test whether you can apply those doctrines to help prepare for the bar exam. If you are lucky, you get a few classes where you are encouraged to think more critically and read critical texts rather than just casebooks, and perhaps write a paper that is not a legal memo or brief.

  Dean Spade

  Writing, School, Thinking

  "On Normal Life". Interview with Natalie Oswin, societyandspace.org. January 15, 2014.

• Because my graduate academic training at law school was not one that included most of the intellectual traditions I find useful for understanding the conditions and problems that most concern me - anti-colonial theories, Foucault, critical disability studies, prison studies and the like are rarely seen in standard US Law School curricula, where students are still fighting on many campuses to get a single class on race or poverty offered - I developed most of my thinking about these topics through activist reading groups and collaborative writing projects with other activist scholars.

  Dean Spade

  Reading, Writing, School

  "On Normal Life". Interview with Natalie Oswin, societyandspace.org. January 15, 2014.

• "Oppression" or "systems of oppression" operate as a shorthand terms in much writing and speaking so that we do not have to list all these systems of meaning and control each time (i.e. racism, ableism, xenophobia, etc.). I needed a term like that, but "oppression" implies a kind of top-down understanding of power that is at odds with the Foucaultian model I rely on in my work.

  Dean Spade

  Xenophobia, Writing, Top Down

  "On Normal Life". Interview with Natalie Oswin, societyandspace.org. January 15, 2014.

• Over the past decade I have watched many friends go through graduate school and write dissertations. Through that process, I have seen how they are guided by mentors to understand particular norms within their disciplines and to learn about what they can and cannot, should and should not say, and which ideas can go together and which cannot. I never went through this process.

  Dean Spade

  Writing, School, Past

  "On Normal Life". Interview with Natalie Oswin, societyandspace.org. January 15, 2014.

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin