eHarmony’s Chief Scientist Dr. J. Galen Buckwalter, the master designer of the site’s matching algorithm, is not only a research psychologist but also a singer of a punk band, and he and two associates made a award-winning documentary in PBS.
He is also a C6-7 quadriplegic.
He gave Ryan Howes, a blogger of Psychology Today, a great interview last week regarding disability and his film. It’s a fun read about an interesting person.
Ryan: crippled, handicapped, disabled, differently-abled, etc. Your thoughts and preferences?
Galen: Just not ‘late to dinner.’
Semantics are certainly relevant in some civil rights issues but when you are talking about chronic physical differences there are so many flavors that trying to find an overarching label is somewhat akin to trying to find a label for all of the types of music that suck right now. I mean does shoegazer really differ from emo, and does emo differ from dreampop? It is all music and unless you like a particular type in a profound way it really doesn’t make much difference. My personal preference for my specific condition tends toward the more descriptively confrontive. Gimp, cripple; they both seem to describe how I am physically different from the norm and they also imply that my physical anomalies underlie social stigmas. And they both have a bit of punk rock flair about them, no? Read the rest of the interview
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