It was a lovely day in Boston, and while getting some sunlight to get my circadian rhythm in sync I listened to books for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was “Degrees of Risk” by Blake R. Silver. This is a probing, insightful, qualitative dive into different kinds of precarity and student experiences in public higher education, using interviews to highlight how these institutions are built for the most privileged despite their mission. It's an impressive work of scholarship, with Silver synthesizing themes from across hundreds of interviews to demonstrate the extremely variable experiences of students and the challenge of pinning a single definition on the value and goals of a college degree. Students who planned to take their classes over more than four years, and the challenges of balancing earning an income to survive combined while attempting to take classes, while expected, was visceral in its detail. The full commitment to qualitative data only, however, means that on its own this book is an incomplete look at this issue and requires further reading to holistically understand. If you're in higher education (or hiring people with college experience), however, you'll get a lot out of this book. Highly recommend https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo220544002.html

Last was “We See Things They’ll Never See” by Chantelle Jessica Lewis and Jason Arday. That Jason Arday, one of the authors of this book, was essentially lynched less than one year after its publication is inescapable context here. The book itself is a fairly standard if slightly meandering critical studies book, with neurodiversity itself almost never directly touched throughout. The sections that are most insightful, perhaps unsurprisingly, are those that do engage with that topic and what it means to be neurodivergent in modern society. That there is a section on suicide risk for neurodivergent people is particularly painful to read. Overall, the fact that an author of a fine but unremarkable book was hounded by racists and the press to a degree far out of proportion with any potential academic wrongs makes it all the more important to engage with this text https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691262727/we-see-things-theyll-never-see