
Open Society
Seth Cotlar: "Her papers also contain this interesting "how to guide" written for public officials. It contained practical suggestions for how to deal with right wing extremists who were trying to ratfuck public institutions like schools and municipal government." — Bluesky
Her papers also contain this interesting "how to guide" written for public officials. It contained practical suggestions for how to deal with right wing extremists who were trying to ratfuck public institutions like schools and municipal government.

LBJ: 'If You Can Convince the Lowest White Man He's Better Than the Best Colored Man ...'
President Lyndon B. Johnson, who grew up in the South and understood the politics of racism from the inside, saw it in part as a ploy to divide and conquer.
"I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it," he said. "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

A precision functional atlas of personalized network topography and probabilities
Nature Neuroscience - The Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain (MIDB) Precision Brain Atlas is a resource of personalized brain network topographies (n = 9,900). It also provides...

PsyArXiv Preprints | Smart Environments for Diverse Cognitive Styles: the Case of Autism
This paper, drawing from complex systems theory (CST), advances a framework that proposes the implementation of Ambient Smart Environments (ASEs) for personalised cognitive styles. The paper begins by arguing that Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) can be described and understood as embodied misattunement with a neurotypical (sociocultural) environment. Personalising the environment is an opportunity for fitting a cognitive style, e.g. autistic interaction with the environment. High variability, noise, and rigidity can result in difficulties adapting to (neurotypical) environmental demands. This may result in rigid or repetitive behaviour, corresponding, in CST, to a “stuck state” or “local minimum”. Preventive intervention with ASE (by increasing free energy and moving out of the “stuck state” and into a new stable state) for autistic interaction with the environment can help develop patterns of flexible adjustment and attunement to the environment. ASE offers an opportunity for personalised therapeutic intervention for manipulating the environment to fit a cognitive style.

Forgetting and becoming
a reflection on the unknowability of everyone we love

What Does It Mean to Be Human Today? | Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics | Cambridge Core
What Does It Mean to Be Human Today?

Report – Unsafe: Meta Fails to Moderate Extreme Anti-trans Hate Across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads | GLAAD
GLAAD’s Social Media Safety Program reported the following anti-trans hate content across Instagram, Facebook, and Threads; Meta deemed all of it non-violative or did not take action on it.

A trans-diagnostic investigation of attention, hyper-focus, and monotropism in autism, attention dysregulation hyperactivity development, and the general population - Patrick Dwyer, Zachary J Williams, Wenn B. Lawson, Susan M Rivera, 2024
The monotropism hypothesis posits that hyper-focus on interests is core to autistic cognition; moreover, hyper-focus is common in attention dysregulation hypera...

Words that make me go hmmm: Care
Care. We use the term all the time. Care is described in a plan and delivered in a package. Care has a start date and an end date. It comes in episodes. Time frames. Short-term. Temporary. Intermed…

'To Siri With Love' and the Problem With Neurodiversity Lite
The word "neurodiversity" and the idea it represents—that autistic people and other people whose minds function in atypical ways are equal, not less—has gained a tenuous foothold in the public consciousness. Still, many members of the autistic advocacy community remain skeptical and wary, suspecting that the changes are superficial.

The reality of autism: On the metaphysics of disorder and diversity
Typically, although it’s notoriously hard to define, autism has been represented as a biologically-based mental disorder that can be usefully investigated by biomedical science. In recent years, ho...

Frontiers | School distress and the school attendance crisis: a story dominated by neurodivergence and unmet need
BackgroundThe Covid-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus a school attendance crisis in many countries, although this likely pre-dates the pandemic. Child...

The production of the ‘normal’ child | 3 | Neurodiversity and the comm
The creation of autism as a diagnostic category, and the societal responses to it recommended currently and, in the past, has a specific historical and

The Saturation Model and the Low Arousal Approach for Inclusion in Schools
In this article, we will explain what the Saturation Model is, and how it operates in conjunction with the Low Arousal Approach.
No two learners are the same: there is a need to adapt policies and practices to suit individual young people’s needs. Having strict inflexible rules is not compatible with the Saturation Model, which involves proactive planning and personalisation. People will be late, turn up to school distressed, struggle to wear parts of their uniform that are uncomfortable sensory experiences, and many, many more things that we cannot always predict. Building accommodations and planning for differences within policies and practice allows for flexibility and freedom. Examples of flexible provision include allowing learners to access quiet areas as and when they require, adaptable timetables, uniform leniency, and scheduling time before class starts to decompress from the morning.

Toward a Neuroqueer Politics in the Classroom: Cunning Embodiment and the Limits of This Order by Professor Sara M. Acevedo
Join us for the final fall event for the UMN IAS Critical Disability Studies Research Colloquium, a lecture by Professor Sara M. Acevedo (Miami University) called "Toward a Neuroqueer Politics in the Classroom: Cunning Embodiment and the Limits of *This* Order."
This talk stems from a series of meditations on autistic ontoepistemology and medical coding as symbolic violence. While foregrounding the material impact of symbolic violence on lifeforms marked as “disorderly” and thus inherently “out of place,” this colloquium presentation operationalizes Deleuze’s critique of “common sense” to challenge the modern coding of autism as a form of neuropathology. Using her lived experiences as an autistic woman of color, Professor Acevedo draws on spatial politics and critical autism studies to offer a neurosomatic prefiguration of a more just future for autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people who often navigate predominantly non-disabled spaces.
Bio:
Sara M. Acevedo is an autistic Mestiza educator and disability justice scholar activist born and raised in Colombia, South America. She is Assistant Professor of Disability Studies and faculty associate at the Doris Bergen Center for Human Development, Learning and Technology at Miami University. Professor Acevedo’s scholarship combines disability anthropology and critical disability studies with a focus on autism and neurodiversity. Her research explores the productive intersection of spatial politics, self-governance, and transgressive discourse. She is on the Board of Directors of the Society for Disability Studies and serves on the Editorial Boards of Disability and the Global South: The International Journal and Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture.
[Photo of Professor Acevedo sitting on the bench at Miami’s campus on a sunny Fall afternoon. She is a light-skinned Mestiza with short curly brown hair in a plaid jacket, white jeans, blue pants, and maroon boots. She is holding a framed proclamation and presidential medallion to her side. Her service dog Coco, a black standard poodle, stands next to her with his head slightly lowered and placed across her lap. She rests one hand on his shoulder..]
Free and open to the public.
RSVP using this link to get the Zoom link and submit access information: https://z.umn.edu/cdsrc-rsvp-saramacevedo
The CDSRC events are enabled by funding from the UMN Institute for Advanced Studies and are co-sponsored by the Critical Disability Studies Collective; the Race, Indigeneity, Gender, and Sexual Studies (RIGS) Initiative, the Department of American Studies, and the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies., powered by Localist, the Community Event Platform

Police training programs have a pseudoscience problem
Experts told Insider not only that there's a lack of science in police training, but there's also no one to regulate the spread of misinformation.

Forty-Six States Paid for Violent, Racist Police Training. We Should Ban Pretextual Stops Instead.
The New Jersey Comptroller’s office found that a police training company gave racist, violent advice. Ban pretextual traffic stops instead.

Opinion | The Real Roots of the Debate Over Schools During Covid (Published 2022)
How “taxpayer” became just another kind of consumer.

Why You Can't Debate a Conspiracy Theorist Back to Reality
Part I: Whiteness, Christianity, and Conflict Avoidance

Do autism researchers focus on things that autistic people want them to? | BPS
New research from Scotland finds some disconnect between academic and autistic community research priorities.

Opinion | My brother isn’t permitted to read his own story. That’s a remnant of slavery.
Prisons censor what inmates can read, a throwback to when it was a crime to teach enslaved people to read.

Children Have a Right to Go to School
Nex Benedict's death is a civil rights issue. We have the responsibility, and the power, to make sure this never happens again.

LIBERTAD - Downeate - Mismas Realidades
Video: "Libertad"Valentín decide romper con la rutina y pasar un día diferente. Harto de siempre hacer lo mismo él se ratea del colegio para sentirse libre....

The Actual Best PSA ever | David M. Perry
Patreon is empowering a new generation of creators.
Support and engage with artists and creators as they live out their passions!

I hated history — until I learned about Shirley Chisholm
Growing up as a Black girl in grade school, I hated history. I was never in the history books. Though I didn't know it at the time, I was intentionally left out of them.

How Medicare drug price negotiations stand to impact women
Women make up more than half of Medicare recipients and are more likely to skip or delay taking their medications due to cost.

‘It feels like a mountain you never get done climbing’: COVID isn’t over for disabled and older adults
Four years into the pandemic, disabled people interviewed by The 19th described feeling isolated and hopeless.

What Are Your Rights at Work As a Young Person?
Exploitation of young people on the job is way too common.
