Open Society

I know that, for me, it’s important to have spaces like this because it gives a sense of community to people who tend to be pushed to the sidelines. This gives us somewhere to unmask, and be with others who know what we’re going through. It gives people a chance to go to events that otherwise make them anxious, or just wholly uncomfortable. 

The Comic Arts Festival is an event I personally love going to, but it’s true, it can be extremely overwhelming to go to an event like that. I know that having somewhere calm and inviting to go sit, de-stress, and just be yourself will make the experience of the whole event that much better.

I know that for me, I generally just don’t go to any busy events because they’re so overwhelming with all the people and noise and everything.

I have heard of quiet rooms at some conventions. What I’ve seen in my Google searches is that the focus is often just on being quiet. While that’s great, I don’t think that’s really designed from a neurodivergent perspective. Sitting still in a quiet room isn’t necessarily the best thing, when you need to stim, and the fluorescent lights are buzzing, and you can hear the electricity in the walls. As for barriers, the biggest barrier is space. Organisers just aren’t thinking about it when they book space. So I guess the biggest barrier is actually that the neurodivergent community and our needs are still an afterthought, if they think of us at all.

Retreat isn’t just a quiet room, it is an explicitly neurodivergent space. Nothing about us without us, right? It’s a place to stim freely, drop the mask a little, and find some neurodivergent kinfolk. We’ll have chairs but also cushions for sitting on the floor. There will be different kinds of stim toys, stuff for doodling/drawing, and some plushies for hugging. We will also have ear plugs and eye masks for people who need to block out some stimulation. I also want to make it clear that we are operating based on a clear set of values grounded in intersectionality and community care, the room will always be staffed, and we will be actively maintaining a safe space for BIPOC, LGBTQIA, fat, and disabled folk.

As it stands, the biggest barrier is space. Just like with so many issues around accessibility, meeting the needs of the neurodivergent community is still seen as something extra when it should be the default. Our needs aren’t “special,” they’re just different and we have just as much right to enjoy events like conventions and markets as anyone else.

One of my rules as a reader is to read one book mentioned in or cited in every book that I read. It not only solves the problem of ‘what to read next’ but it sends you on a journey down the rabbit hole.

Go down the rabbit hole (embrace serendipity)

You have to embrace the accidental.

Directly, these books had nothing to do with what I was writing about, but because my mind was primed to see connections, I found them in the most unusual places.I can’t tell you how many leads I’ve tracked down from random Wikipedia citations. Explore what you’re curious about and know, and let it lead you to what you don’t.

This means marking everything you think is interesting, transcribing it and organizing it. As a researcher, you’re as rich as your database. Not only in being able to pull something out at a moment’s notice, but that that something gives you a starting point with which to make powerful connections. As cards about the same theme begin to accumulate, you’ll know you’re onto a big or important idea.

Alt text is an essential part of web accessibility. It is often disregarded or understood through the lens of compliance, as an unwelcome burden to be met with minimum effort. How can we instead approach alt text thoughtfully and creatively?

We believe in a world where everyone can contribute. We believe that all digital products should be open to contributions; from legal documents to movie scripts, and from websites to chip designs.

10 PRINCIPLES OF DISABILITY JUSTICE INTERSECTIONALITY “We do not live single issue lives” –Audre Lorde. Ableism, coupled with white supremacy, supported by capitalism, underscored by heteropatriarchy, has rendered the vast majority of the world “invalid.”LEADERSHIP OF THOSE MOST IMPACTED “We are led by those who most know these systems.” –Aurora Levins MoralesANTI-CAPITALIST POLITIC In an economy that sees land and humans as components of profit, we are anti-capitalist by the nature of having non-conforming body/minds.COMMITMENT TO CROSS-MOVEMENT ORGANIZING Shifting how social justice movements understand disability and contextualize ableism, disability justice lends itself to politics of alliance.RECOGNIZING WHOLENESS People have inherent worth outside of commodity relations and capitalist notions of productivity. Each person is full of history and life experience.SUSTAINABILITY We pace ourselves, individually and collectively, to be sustained long term. Our embodied experiences guide us toward ongoing justice and liberation.COMMITMENT TO CROSS-DISABILITY SOLIDARITY We honor the insights and participation of all of our community members, knowing that isolation undermines collective liberation.INTERDEPENDENCE We meet each others’ needs as we build toward liberation, knowing that state solutions inevitably extend into further control over lives.COLLECTIVE ACCESS As brown, black and queer-bodied disabled people we bring flexibility and creative nuance that go beyond able-bodied/minded normativity, to be in community with each other.COLLECTIVE LIBERATION No body or mind can be left behind – only moving together can we accomplish the revolution we require.

I bet you know someone with an undiagnosed chronic illness. Maybe they complain about their health all the time or they always seem to cancel plans. Maybe this has been happening for years and you’ve started to write them off as a hypochondriac, a drama queen. Maybe you believe that if something was seriously wrong, their doctor would have figured it out by now.

The CDC estimates that in 2018, almost 45 million people in the US were living with at least one chronic condition that interfered with their daily life. And according to those estimates, that number has been rising by more than 700,000 people per year on average. So it stands to reason that there are a whole lot of people living with unexplained symptoms right now, just like I was.

The autistic theory of monotropism can be viewed as the strongest autism theory. It explains both the cognitive and sensory differences experienced by autistic persons (Chown, 2017; Murray, Lesser & Lawson, 2005). Monotropism, views autistic experiences as based around interest creating “attention tunnels” where the amount of processing resource or attention each person can utilise at any moment is a limited resource. How each person experiences attention varies forming a continuum, with polytropism at one extreme and monotropism at the other. Monotropism is a single, hyper focused attention tunnel compared to polytropism when an individual has multiple simultaneous slightly aroused or primed interests, with a low level processing flow constantly connecting them. During a monotropic state, perception is hyper focused on a narrow range of subjects which may be broad or deep in themselves, while outside stimuli are occluded from perception. Sudden interruptions to monotropic states can be highly distressing and disorientating, proportional to the intensity of monotropic state and the severity of its ending. Such occurrences explain demand avoidance behaviour in Pathological Demand Avoidance. It is argued that the characteristic spiky skills profile is caused by which interests arouse amonotropic state, while other skills remain side felt experience (Milton, 2017). Monotropism (Murray, Lesser & Lawson, 2005) clearly offers much to elucidate traits associated with autism as compared to the main cognitive theories, conversely at present it is not widely recognised (Chown, 2017; Milton, 2017). As many research articles do not rely on autism theory (Chown, 2017), there is also little prevent further exploration of monotropism.

Sudden interruptions to monotropic states can be highly distressing and disorientating, proportional to the intensity of monotropic state and the severity of its ending. Such occurrences explain demand avoidance behaviour in Pathological Demand Avoidance. It is argued that the characteristic spiky skills profile is caused by which interests arouse a monotropic state, while other skills remain side felt experience (Milton, 2017).

The inseparability of the human body and spirit becomes quite evident when we study trauma. Trauma is an injury or wounding of the soul that has physical effects on the entire body system. The concept of trauma demands that we explore reality beyond the physical.

The vagus conducts physical, energetic, emotional, and spiritual information from the brain to body and vice versa. We do not completely understand all aspects of this yet, but that doesn’t make it unscientific. Where the nervous system is concerned, science and spirituality are one and the same. In many ways, nervous system science is kinda magical. After all, isn’t magic just technology that too complicated to explain yet?

Children do not need to be fixed, and when we attempt to fix them, we inherently ignore the environment the child is in, particularly the context within the educational system that may have led to the behavior that we feel needs to be fixed.

The most prevalent way that we try to fix children is through interventions rooted in behavior theory, including positive and negative reinforcement, and positive and negative punishment. Examples of positive reinforcement include token economies and behavior charts, and often fall under the larger umbrella Positive Behavior Interventions & Supports (PBIS).

“Explaining behavior without taking into consideration an individual’s thoughts or feelings” – operating without taking into consideration a child’s thoughts and feelings is contrary to the work we should be doing as educators.

When we view behavior through a traditional lens, we punish dysregulation.

When working with humans, it is crucial that we shift the lens in which we view behavior from the traditional four functions of behavior to survival brain responses that occur due to feeling unsafe. Our most important goal as educators should be to promote safety within the classroom and school setting so students are not feeling threatened and going into flight, fight, freeze mode.

Disability Dongles are contemporary fairy tales that appeal to the abled imagination by presenting a heroic designer-protagonist whose prototype provides a techno-utopian (re)solution to the design problem. Disability Dongle rhetoric instills in students the value of a quick fix over structural change, thus preventing them from seeking out, participating in, and contributing to existing inquiry. By labeling these material-discursive phenomena—the designed artifacts and the discourse through which their meaning is constituted—we work to shift the focus from their misguided concern about our bodies to their under-analyzed intentions and ambitions.

I proposed the moniker as a joke, in response to a cycle of extraction and abandonment, in which disabled subjects test prototypes that will never make it to market. But its logic immediately became obvious: a dongle is an adaptor and a Disability Dongle is adaptive; both are created to make their subject compatible with a normative system. Though the origins of the term “dongle” are hazy, shrouded in academic urban legends, it’s an undeniably silly word. This makes it the perfect term for a very silly category of object, one which is implicated in a pattern of social extraction, production, and circulation that elicits laughter as a trauma response. Disability Dongles inherently lack a fluency in the sociotechnical apparatus of disability.

Individuals who have a sociotechnical fluency of disability are not treated by the media as experts, which is why we wind up in comments sections rather than in stories.

The functions of a Disability Dongle operate in tension with one another. To the disabled users they are ostensibly designed for (or “with”) they are at best speculative: promising in concept but in actuality unattainable. At worst, they enact normative or curative harm upon disabled users. At the same time, nondisabled people are not made aware that they have also become “users” through their reading and sharing of easily consumable, feel-good content. The Disability Dongle relies on their lack of fluency, so they don’t recognize that they’re being manipulated.

This devaluation of existing disabled users is essential to creating a Disability Dongle: it can’t solve a problem disabled people never knew they had by listening to them.

In plain terms, the design process of creating a Disability Dongle isn’t actually about producing an assistive device, shitty or not, it’s about producing an idea of what disability is. It’s not a failure that they don’t create a useful assistive device because that’s not what Disability Dongles are actually about. The technology, media, and cultural artifacts that reproduce disability as pitiable and technology as savior are the entire point.

A computer environment removes some of the most difficult aspects of communication and makes it much more achievable. Role playing games can help develop more pragmatic skills; many are available to play online, or they can be played without a computer using special packs of cards. The events which are virtually experienced have many shared properties with real life events; they will call forth the same emotional reactions and present the same sorts of issues and opportunities in a sphere of mutual interaction and cooperation. But these events have clear and explicit rules, and the relationships do not have to outlast the game, although they may, because of course real people are playing. So these may be a fruitful source of social skills for linguistically able autistic children in a relatively manageable, non-rejecting and just social climate.