hypervodka

I've heard of studies claiming ecigarettes are still dangerous and not a "healthy" alternative. I think the verdict is still up in the air though since there hasn't been enough long term data and studies on it. Either way, you can buy disposable ecigarettes for about $10 (might vary by state/county, but they are at least a few bucks more expensive than a pack of regular smokes). I'm a smoker as well and I think I will buy a couple of these during interview weekends. They leave a minimal smell (if any at all) and are much more satisfying than gum/patch/dip. They can be used very discreetly as well, such as in a bathroom or your hotel/dorm room. I think this is the best way to go for such an event. You could also supplement ecigs with real cigarettes at nighttime when you know you definitely won't be around anyone important, in the event that the ecigs aren't satisfying enough.
 
Based on my local options I would recommend Vuse or Njoy. Njoys are slightly cheaper per pen ($7) and pretty much replica size of real cigarettes (they even burn with red LEDs at the tip IIRC), but they aren't rechargeable/refillable. Vuse is slightly more expensive but offers the option of buying "refills" after you buy the core set ($10; cigarette pen + charger + 1 cartridge). The refill package comes with 2 cartridges to replace on the pen when your first runs out. Vuse are fairly larger than a real cigarette though. I've noticed that the Njoys can give you a slight burning sensation in your throat when you first start using them, I didn't notice this when I used Vuse. Both of these should be available at any major gas station.
 
To address the points from posts above:
-I don't think you look silly with an ecig. They have become common on campus at my undergrad institution, especially since real smoking was banned. I've heard they are much more popular/common out in the west (USA) as well.
-I don't think the "we are all adults" argument is valid. The smell of cigarettes is not enjoyable for many people and lingers on your clothes for much longer than you'd think. Either way, potentially having your chances hurt by something as silly and avoidable as this is just not worth the cost of smoking.

Take a list of questions with you.  There was a great thread on this back when I applied, and I took this and asked them of the DGS when meeting with her, grad students I met there, and some here with people at the schools I was considering.  Depending on where you go, you'll probably be put in contact with a current grad student.  These people are great resources, and most will answer your questions directly about both strengths and weaknesses of programs.
 
I just looked to see if I still had this list in an old folder, and here it is.
 
-PLACES TO STUDY AND WORK
-Where do most people do their writing and reading?
-What study spaces are available? Do students get a carrel? Do those who teach get or share an office?

-LIBRARY
-What is the library system like? Are the stacks open or closed?
-What are the library hours?
-Are there specialized archives/primary sources that would be useful to my research?
-Are there specialist librarians who can help me with my research?

-FACULTY
-Are the faculty members I want to work with accepting new students? Are any of those faculty members due for a sabbatical any time soon?
-Are professors willing to engage you on a personal level rather than just talking about your work?
-Are there any new professors the department is hiring in areas that align with my interests?
-Students’ relationships with their professors – are they primarily professional, or are they social as well?

-FUNDING
-Is funding competitive? If so, do students feel a distinction between those who have received more generous funding and those who haven’t?
-How does funding break down among the cohort? i.e., how many people receive fellowships?
-How, if you don’t have much savings, do you make enough money to live comfortably?
-Are there external fellowships one can apply to? If so, what is available? Does the program help you apply for these fellowships? How does receiving an external fellowship affect internal funding?
-If people need more than five/six years to finish, what funding resources are available? (For instance, Columbia can give you an additional 2-year teaching appointment.)
-Do you provide funding for conferences or research trips?
-How often is funding disbursed? (i.e., do you get paid monthly or do you have to stretch a sum over a longer period of time?)

-COHORT
-Do students get along with each other? Is the feeling of the program more collaborative than competitive?
-Do students in different years of the program collaborate with each other, or are individual cohorts cliquey?
-How many offers are given out, and what is the target number of members for an entering class?
-Ages/marital status of people in the cohort – do most people tend to be married with families? Are there younger people? Single people? What sense do you have of how the graduate students interact with each other socially?
-Do people seem happy? If they’re stressed, is it because they’re busy or is it because they’re anxious/depressed/cynical/disillusioned?
-Is the grad secretary/program administrator nice?
-What is the typical time to completion? What are the factors that slow down or speed up that time?
-I’ve read that there are two kinds of attrition: “good” attrition, in which people realize that the program, or graduate study, isn’t right for them and leave early on, and “bad” attrition, in which people don’t finish the dissertation. What can you tell me about the rates of each, and of the reasons why people have chosen to leave the program?

-JOB MARKET/PROFESSIONALIZATION
-What is the placement rate? How many of those jobs are tenure-track?
-What are examples of institutions in which people in my field have been placed?
-How does the department prepare you for the job search? Are there mock interviews and mock job talks?
-Are the people helping you navigate the job search people who have recently gone through the process themselves?
-If you don’t get placed, is there anything the department can do for you? (e.g., can you stay an extra year?)
-How does the department prepare you for and help you attain conference presentations and publications?

-SUMMER WORK
-What is encouraged/required?
-If there separate funding/is the year-round funding enough to live on during the summer?
-Do people find themselves needing to get outside work during the summer in order to have enough money?
-Am I expected to stay in town in the summer, and what happens if I don’t?

-LANGUAGE REQUIREMENT
-What is done to help people who don’t have language proficiency attain it? Does the university provide funding?
-What is the requirement, and by when do you have to meet it?
-Given my research interests, what languages should I study?
-When do you recommend doing the work necessary to fulfill the language requirement? (i.e., summer before first year, summer after first year, while taking classes, etc.)

-LOCATION REQUIREMENTS
-How long are students required to be in residence?
-How many students stay in the location for the duration of the program? (i.e., how many dissertate in residence?)
-How is funding affected if you don’t stay?

-Incompletes on papers at the end of the term: What is the policy, how many students take them, and how does this affect progress through the program?

-TEACHING
-What sort of training is provided?
-What types of courses do people teach?
-Does teaching entail serving as a grader? Serving as a TA? Developing and teaching a section of comp?
-How are students placed as TAs? Is there choice about what classes you teach and which professors you work with? Do classes correspond to your field?
-How many courses do you teach per semester/year?
-How many students are in your classes?
-How does the school see teaching as fitting in with the other responsibilities/requirements of graduate study?
-How do students balance teaching with their own work?
-Is the department more concerned with training you as a teacher/professor or with having cheap labor to teach their classes?
-How, if at all, does the economic downturn affect teaching load/class sizes?
-What are the students like? Can I sit in on a course a TA teaches to get a sense of them?

-METHODOLOGY
-Is a theory course required?
-What methodology do most people use?
-Where, methodologically, do you see the department – and the discipline – heading?
-Is interdisciplinarity encouraged, and what sorts of collaboration have students undertaken?

-Typical graduate class and seminar sizes

-What should I do to prepare over the summer?

-Ask people I know: What are the questions – both about the program itself and about the location – I should ask that will most help me get a feel for whether this is the right program for me?

-Ask people I know: What do you wish you knew or wish you had asked before choosing a program?

-Is the school on the semester or the quarter system, and how does that affect classes/teaching/requirements?

-What is the course load for each semester, and how many courses are required?

-What kind of support is provided while writing the dissertation? I worry about the isolation and anxiety of writing such a big project. What does the program do to help you break the dissertation down into manageable pieces, and to make the experience less isolating?

-What do writing assignments look like in classes? Do they differ based on the type/level of class and/or based on whether you intend to specialize in the field?

-Ask professors: what have you been working on lately?

-Ask professors: What is your approach to mentoring and advising graduate students?

-How long are class meetings?

-How often do professors teach graduate courses?

-Are course schedules available for future semesters (10-11, etc.)?

-Can I see the grad student handbook? Are there any other departmental documents – such as reports on the program prepared for accreditation – that I can see?


-QUALITY OF LIFE
-Prices – how does the cost of gas, milk, cereal, etc. compare to other places I've lived in?
-Cost and quality of typical one-bedroom apartment.
-What does the university do to provide you with or help you find housing?
-When (i.e., what month) do people start looking for an apartment for the fall, and where do they look?
-Is it easy to find a summer subletter?
-How close to campus can—and should—one live?
-What grocery stores are there in town?
-How late are cafes, bookstores, malls, restaurants typically open?
-What do people do to make extra money?
-Does the town have more of a driving or a walking culture? What is parking like near campus (availability, ease, cost)?
-Where do most English grad students live? Most other grad students? Most professors? Where is the student ghetto? Do most students live near each other, or are they spread out far and wide?
-How far does the stipend go in this location?

I wondered the same thing. I think it was based on my (fairly specific) interests on my profile, as I had posted a question along the lines of "has anyone heard back from Purdue?" He just sent me a message saying "This is the Purdue DGS. Could you email me at _____ about your application?" From there he told me that they liked my application and I was high up on the waitlist. 

Yo are you dumb fucks really arguing about this?

Let me poop some truth on you.

Even if you don't get a tenure track job at Columbia. An ivy league will. Will. Help you get a job at Melbourne or Berlin or Penguin or Verso or some other fucking corner of the world where they pay a decent amount of money to talk Marlowe.

So suck it up. And realize that brand name does have value.

And if God forbid. You end up having kids and a partner that loves going to the spa every fucking 9th weekend. You will still fucking need an income to pay for that bs. So here's the cold damn truth -- money matters. Reputation matters. And even if you don't end up teaching. You could make a living as an editor or an administrator. And pay the bills.

Sorry that reality doesn't sound like a Stoppard show.

But here's the truth -- if you got bills to pay, where you come from has significant fucking bearing on where you end up.

Ouch, nice work you two! Here goes nothing------
 
Stats
School: Portland State University  Major: English  Major GPA: 3.9 Overall GPA: 3.84 GRE Scores: 159 V; 143 Q (I don't want to talk about it); 5.0 AW Statement of Purpose
 
I had to mould each of these to fit within the schools' parameters and wishes, but essentially I started out discussing the fragmented nature of my education experience, and the ways in which it parallels with the fragmentation of postmodernism as a literary movement. Highlighted my interest on narrative evolution in the twentieth and twenty-first century, as well as the mystical and the unexplained, both as fantasy projections and as a point of tension between pre-modernist superstition and the disillusioned postmodern sensibility. Also briefly went into the dividing point in my college career when I had to drop out of school due to a prolonged illness, during which my naivety drowned in a well of incredulity, and I came to realize where my actual literary interests were in the first place (i.e. I entered college as a cretinous English major freshman who was so naive that I didn't even KNOW that contemporary lit. studies existed). Related my long-term goals with my areas of focus, primarily the ways in which we appropriate and grapple with the past in order to write the future.
 
 
Writing Sample
 
I was actually torn about using the sample that I did because I felt like it was my most well-written and perhaps cohesive work to date, yet wasn't sure how well it aligned with my points of interest. Turns out after giving it a fresh reading, it actually fit rather well. It was a term paper I wrote on Toni Morrison and Beloved, and approached the collective shattering/consolidation of identity from a Marxist standpoint, examining the ways in which the novel emphatically displays the transmutation of physical oppressions (i.e. the body) wholly into the political apparatus. I used support from the characters' fragmented emotional experiences to show the ways in which they struggle to make a future for themselves among figurative (and literal) "ghosts in the machine." 

STATS
 School: Very Small State University Major: English Literature
I took upwards of 15 literary theory and history courses at my alma mater, which may be a little unusual, not sure. Minor: Creative Writing Major GPA: 4.0 Cumulative GPA: 3.83, magna cum laude GRE Scores: V: 166
Q: 157 
AW: 5.5
Subject: 670
 
WS
Conjoins psychoanalytic discourse on the construction of the joke (in terms of joker, joke-object, and joke-subject) to the similar triangular figuration of the performance of passing (passer, dupe, clairvoyant spectator), charting the Heideggerrian communities of building constructed around those able to accurately race the ambiguous body.
 
PS/SOP
Introduction: My personal experience with a concept known in communication theory as "idioglossia," which I relate to construction of collective language in literature. Discusses my interest in performance theory, mentioning several papers presented at regional and national conferences. Depending on the school, also mentioned my target university's experience with performance theory. Relates that interest to my interest in discursive performance, ambiguous bodies (transvestism, costuming, passing). Discusses professional research experience in this arena. Details my intended graduate research interests and explains my writing sample. Relates my interests explicitly with POIs and students already in the program. Mentions members of the faculty in the history department, philosophy department, and African-American studies department as applicable. Conclusion: areas I'm further interest exploring in my research: mathematical theory, digital textual analysis, and literacy in law and literature

Hey there - I'm in a different field, but the same relationship boat .. plus kids.
 
My partner and I had many, many discussions about this. When we met, I was looking at programs already. I delayed applying for a year so that after I moved in (from overseas) to be with him and his kids in the U.S., we would have more than a couple months of living together before also moving together. 
 
He has geographic limits, which are now my geographic limits. That was the first narrow-down. 
Within those limits I found all the programs I would like to apply to (there were about 7 or 8). From that list, he looked at the cities and states and decided which he would be OK with living in or not, and which ones actually had a relevant job market for him. 
 
If it were just us two, we'd live out of cardboard boxes nearly - we really don't care. But when you have little ones involved, the game gets a lot more stressful, and the stakes are a lot higher. 
 
From that list, we looked at which places have decent enough schools.
 
Now we're down to three. And even of those three, there's one he's very uncomfortable with, but he knows it's a dream program, so wants to support me if possible. I think he also feels indebted because I left my supremely posh overseas job to come be with him and help raise his kids. 
 
I had to come to the conclusion and agreement with myself, that if he chokes at the last minute, I will still move forward with my graduate career. I can't put my life on hold forever, and I know I would be resentful and unhealthy if I delayed this one more time. It has been a lifelong goal for me to attend graduate school, and is just about the only thing I am not willing to compromise on. I gave up a really sweet deal, a sweet life, job security and money, to come live in a crappy tiny town (I've never lived somewhere so small in my life), got rid of car because I can't afford it being a freelancer, and gritted my teeth at essentially being a stay-at-home stepparent (something I never, ever wanted... the stay-at-home part). So, I feel like I've given up a lot already. I wont' give up my PhD. I'd lose myself. And I think he knows that.
 
We are tremendously stressed out. I basically just finished moving in, and now we have to start packing up so that we can sell the house. We are also supposed to be getting married in the spring. One of our parents just landed in the ICU. We are under ungodly financial pressure for reasons I won't say here. He has a very well established private practice in town, owns his building and his home, and will have to give all of that up to move himself and his kids to ... we don't even know where yet.
 
With some kind of divine fortune, the kids have been kind of wanting to leave this town anyway, because it is so small and they know it. They are brilliant kids so we have to do right by them as far as schools, and keeping them here would be a really poor choice for them. That said, they are also hesitant and worry about going farther away from their other biological parent (even though they rarely see her as it is - once every two months or so), and are generally, normally, healthily worried about moving overall.
 
What my man and I have realized is that if we are able to endure this s*** all at once right at the beginning of our relationship.... then we are probably going to kick butt as a couple through basically anything that is thrown our way. And that gives us the confidence to go forward.
 
And that's how it is.

It feels like I've been studying for six months straight at this point... so I guess another two weeks of cramming can't hurt...
 
 
It was via email. It was BCC'd, though, I'm not sure how many people were emailed. They said sixteen people would be selected, but I don't know if they have chosen them all. I wish you SO MUCH luck.

Emory's interview acceptance came out today! Good luck everyone! I'm ecstatic--but have no idea how in the world to prepare for the interview, especially since so few schools do them.

Emory's interview acceptance came out today! Good luck everyone! I'm ecstatic--but have no idea how in the world to prepare for the interview, especially since so few schools do them.

Emory's interview acceptance came out today! Good luck everyone! I'm ecstatic--but have no idea how in the world to prepare for the interview, especially since so few schools do them.

Emory's interview acceptance came out today! Good luck everyone! I'm ecstatic--but have no idea how in the world to prepare for the interview, especially since so few schools do them.

Emory's interview acceptance came out today! Good luck everyone! I'm ecstatic--but have no idea how in the world to prepare for the interview, especially since so few schools do them.

I don't know how relevant this is to those not applying to Ohio State, but I found the description of the admissions process on their site to be pretty helpful as I worked on statements:
 
https://english.osu.edu/graduate-studies/admissions-info/prospective-phd
 
About halfway down the page, the DGS explains the sorting and reading process.  I would imagine (maybe?) that several schools take this approach.  This seems to be an altogether different approach than Texas, for example, whose site makes it clear that application reading is department wide and across disciplines.  

For those of you going the early modern route, UConn and Fordham both look to be good options. Funding over $20K/year is pretty uncommon in schools outside the Top 20, but UConn and Fordham both clock in around $21K. 
 
I'm sure this has been brought up in other threads on safety schools, but teaching loads are real problem for programs outside the top 50. I'm currently in the MA program at Alabama, teaching a 2-2 comp load, and I've found that teaching this much while balancing coursework and writing a thesis is pretty exhausting. From what I've seen, a 2-2 is fairly common at schools lower down the list, especially state schools. Just something to keep in mind.

We are celebrating the birth of 2015 and of my beautiful daughter, born on December 18! Hope you are all staying relaxed and confident during this dreaded waiting period!

There's also the trickle down effect of the poor applicant pool. I know at Rutgers, which typically accepts students who have also applied to, and been accepted at, schools like Harvard and Yale, our top picks are frequently also the top picks of those schools. And frequently (although not always: we have a crazy number of people who have turned down Cornell and Brown, in particular) those students opt to choose those schools over Rutgers, which means we're reaching deeper into our waitlists. So if applicant pools are lower everywhere, then waitlists have a much higher chance of getting turned into acceptances - as long as cohort size isn't shrinking. I'm sure in some places, cohorts are just made smaller. But I know here, and at a lot of other schools in the Rutgers consortium (such as Princeton, Columbia, NYU, etc) faculty won't let cohort size shrink below a certain number, because then they'd have trouble getting classes approved (due to attendance minimums). There may be a small amount of shrinkage within a certain range (12 applicants instead of 14), but I doubt it would be too severe for that reason - even with reduced application pools.
 
That being said, I think the net effect of the poor applicant pool would mostly be the difference between a waitlist and an acceptance, not a decline and an acceptance. As jhefflol said, a good app is a good app. Schools usually have a fixed number of waitlisted students (the number here generally matches the number of acceptances). Also, a disclaimer: I've been involved in the admissions process here only from the backend: meeting with accepted students, arranging campus visits, informing faculty if someone is likely to accept (to make room for a waitlisted person if they don't) etc. But I have no official knowledge of how applicants are selected.

Hello All,
 
Just to reassure everyone applying to Rutgers who submitted their app on the 15th: the department has a longer application season this year. They've extended the deadline until the 22nd of December. So you should all be fine. The new deadline has been updated on the website.

Well, a couple of thoughts here.
 
First of all, it's a bit late in the game to be overhauling a WS, and you probably don't need to. This is one POI, after all, and not every adcomm member of every school you're applying to. It IS a good thing that the POI took the time to read and respond. The only POI who asked me for my WS didn't reply after I had sent it (which I don't interpret in any way, mind you).
 
Secondly, there's always something to improve. Truly. Always. And sometimes those things will be utterly subjective. But if you think about it -- and I mean really think about it -- even the best works of literature we all know and love have room for improvement. It's one of the simultaneously frustrating and beautiful things about the humanities: you can only ever get close to perfection. What I'm getting at is that any critical comments are indeed better than a simple "Yep, great as is!" gloss. It doesn't mean that you have to take any of those proffered suggestions, of course, and since in this instance the POI had an early draft, you can probably take them or leave them...except for on the WS you send to his institution...if he might be on the adcomm, that is.
 
Long story short, I don't think a professor will beat around the bush about telling you you're not a good candidate for a program. I suspect that constructive comments on your POI are what they are and nothing more.

Yeah, Rutgers does not mention that AT ALL in the FAQ and other application info pages on their website. I don't think it matters, though to be honest, I submitted on the 15th last year, found out I had to wait 24 hours, then found out that my transcripts had to be in hard copy (or maybe that was with UC Irvine??) I'm not sure. Either way: they should put that online somewhere in a visible section because it is not fair to say Dec. 15th deadline, then force everyone finishing on that date to be late. 

A few things to consider: given that most applicants will also have stellar grades, one semester of good grades won't get you into a program. That being said, if you feel like the work you are doing this semester is truly phenomenal, maybe have one of your letter writers touch upon what you're working on this semester. Or heck, you can bring it up yourself in your SoP: "This semester, I working on a paper on blah blah blah, which I hope to expand into a larger project on blah blah blah."

I just want to be clear that while I have had a lot of emotional support, this program is not anywhere near being a graduate school utopia. While I love it here and I love my people here, there is some BULLSHIT--but it's also probably no worse than any other department. Not only that, but Austin is kind of a shitty city to be a minority in already, so it's been one of those semesters that is just fraught with social tension.
 
So, when I say ahistorical I'm talking about the guy1 who wants to talk about war without talking about imperialism, the girl who wants to write about the postbellum South without talking about race, and the people who think that the aesthetic is more important than the political and believe that there is actually a such thing as inherent literary value (which is a point that I disagree with, but can at least understand). Even though these conversations are classroom-specific and probably seem unrelated to police brutality, they are also places where the "good liberal" facade that most academics wear tends to slip and people's biases become visible. To me, those moments are dangerous. The virulent racists are at least the enemy you know, but what happens when these people become professors and administrators? They theoretically understand that we are not in a post-racial society, yet simultaneously feel perfectly comfortable repeatedly using the n-word in class because their desire for an unmediated interaction with the text is more important than my and other black people's trauma?2 I find it deeply disturbing and I'm not sure what to do about it.
 
1These are actual people in my program, by the way
2 Yup, that happened too.

I have nothing well-formed or specific to offer to the discussion, which means I should probably just shut the hell up, but Proflorax's post about "what sort of scholar do you want to be" really sort of hits home with stuff I've been thinking about the past few weeks as I try to negotiate this rift between methodology and politics. Like proflorax, I'm someone who can decide to care or not (a horrific thing to contemplate in itself), and like mollifiedmolloy, I study (and want to study more, adcomms, hint hint) literatures at a great linguistic, cultural, and historical remove from the present. And I say what follows as someone who in what (yes, little--and undergraduate!) scholarship I've done tends to focus on very traditional approaches: philology, word study, formal cruces. The major research project I've been focusing on this semester, examining and preparing a critical edition of this late medieval manuscript, is about as far removed from any sort of contemporary political engagement as you can possibly imagine--I literally am writing whole pages on topics like whether there's a space between that u and that i and what the implications of that would be. And I'm fine with that; it's fun work, I've discovered some new things, and I firmly believe that the production of knowledge of any kind is an inherent good. That's the kind of work I want to do; that's the kind of work I'm applying to graduate school to do.
 
But still. There is a sense of--not sterility, exactly, and not aridness. But I think dazedandbemused hits it exactly on the nose: there's something about the new (read: old) formalist turn that--and again, I say this as someone who loves to make those kind of arguments!--I find dangerously disconnected from (or that can perhaps allow a dangerous disconnection to?) contemporary, urgent, political, and humane interests.

Two recent examples that stuck in my craw: a (white) graduate student who starts saying that a (black) professor's language, in emails to the department listserves about recent events and the department's response, was "too violent," and my complicated, conflicted reaction to both his complaint and to her emails; and then a heated (pleasantly so, though, let me be quick to say!) discussion about the issue of political engagement and scholarship with a good, good friend of mine who's a PhD student a couple weeks ago. We normally take very similar approaches, but it quickly became clear that she has an idea of politically disinterested scholarship--or rather, an idea that scholarship should strive to be politically disinterested, or that it can be--of which I'm pretty darn skeptical.
 
I guess I'm saying that, unlike Wyatt's Torch, I do maybe blame professors who choose to teach the discipline in a vacuum? Okay, so in something very technical like, say, a paleography class, there's not going to be scope for broader political engagement. You're learning very specific skills there, not discussing wider issues of any kind--literary, social, or political. The fact that straight s with a pronounced thickening and pointy end is a sign of a certain script, date, and location does it, in fact, have any sort of relationship to the fact that we live in a society that is, has been, and will be really pretty fucked up. But you'd be surprised how often it does turn up, even in the most seemingly benign philological topics. Just today I was asking a friend which pronunciation of Old Norse I should learn, which you'd think would be the most anodyne and politically not-fraught question you could imagine, but the answer ended up having a lot to do with the contemporary reception of a large body of scholarship that's been tainted by it having been given the Nazis' imprimatur. More broadly, I think any Old English class that doesn't address the frank racism out of which the field initially grew (or at least with which it was watered) ignores some basic things about what it is Anglo-Saxonists do, and have done, that continue to structure the field.
 
That said, I mean, crap: it's easy for me to say, here, on the internets, as an undergraduate, how people in academia should act. I'm not the one up in front of a classroom. I'd have zero idea how to even begin to address it pedagogically, and I know myself and my timidity well enough to know that I probably wouldn't, and that bothers me.

For the record, though, I have actually been talking to a POI about certain Recent Events, because one of her newer books talks a lot about the somatic semantics of pain. (I, too, am bad at being "political," but only in the way that I can't shut up about it.)
 
ETA: What I'm trying to say is that people are talking about it, people care, and that I've switched to thinking about my applications in terms of those R. E.s, if only to make my applications seem more... sensible/sensitive.