Open Society

Since all policies address problems, they necessarily include implicit or explicit constructions of these problems. This paper explores how child maltreatment has been constructed in New Zealand’s child protection policies. It questions the underlying assumptions of this problem construction and seeks to shed light on what has been omitted. Utilizing a qualitative content analysis of eight key policy documents, this study reveals the construction of child maltreatment has been dominated primarily by a child-centric, risk-focused approach. This approach assigns blame and shifts responsibilities onto parents and families. In addition, the vulnerability discourse and social investment approach underpinning this perspective have allowed important structural factors, such as poverty and inequality, to remain unaddressed. This paper also highlights the one-dimensional focus on the lower social class to control future liabilities. We suggest that the harm inflicted by corporations on children’s well-being is another form of child exploitation currently omitted from the problem construction. We suggest that child abuse should be defined and understood in policy as harm to children’s well-being and argue that the state should prevent and mitigate harm by addressing structural forces of the problem as well as protecting children against corporate harms.

Mounting scientific evidence reveals that being infected with SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID — profoundly impacts brain health in many ways.

The CDC’s new “Pan-respiratory” isolation guidelines make sense to many public-health experts, but there could be some downsides, too.

Despite the right's ridiculous DEI conspiracy theories, the Baltimore bridge disaster reminded us that immigrants are what makes America great.

Abstract Over 1% of the UK population has a diagnosis of autism and, of this group, half will also have a learning disability. Studies show that people

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.

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.

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...

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.

a reflection on the unknowability of everyone we love

What Does It Mean to Be Human Today?

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.

The monotropism hypothesis posits that hyper-focus on interests is core to autistic cognition; moreover, hyper-focus is common in attention dysregulation hypera...

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…

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.

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...

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 creation of autism as a diagnostic category, and the societal responses to it recommended currently and, in the past, has a specific historical and

In this article, we will explain what the Saturation Model is, and how it operates in conjunction with the Low Arousal Approach.

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

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.

The New Jersey Comptroller’s office found that a police training company gave racist, violent advice. Ban pretextual traffic stops instead.

How “taxpayer” became just another kind of consumer.

Part I: Whiteness, Christianity, and Conflict Avoidance

New research from Scotland finds some disconnect between academic and autistic community research priorities.

STEM rules everything around me

Prisons censor what inmates can read, a throwback to when it was a crime to teach enslaved people to read.

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

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....