Open Society

A Field Guide for Journalists, Educators, Doctors and anyone else who wants to know how to better communicate about Autism.

No matter how hard you try square pegs don’t fit in round holes. Why is that simple fact so hard for the wider world to grasp? Yes with tools you could round the edges of a square peg. You could ta…

Collaboration as an evolutionary force If autistic people can’t always see the depth of the “bigger picture” of the office politics  around us it does not in any way mean that we …

35 years since the dawn of punk, and we take it for granted that reggae and punk are best mates. Nobody really questions why bands who are known primarily for short, fast shoutalongs—and wouldn’t be caught dead near an acoustic guitar—will once or twice in an album break into their best fake Jamaican accent, let […]

"We are disabled not by our bodies, but by the world around us. Disability is nothing more than a brand."

The authors conclude from a range of literature relevant to the autistic condition that atypical strategies for the allocation of attention are central to the c...

(2021). Autism, intense interests and support in school: from wasted efforts to shared understandings. Educational Review: Vol. 73, No. 1, pp. 34-54.

So. Uh. Lovaas said this, in his 1981 book, The ME book. This is where Lovaas first spelled out ABA.  "With responsibility, the developmentally disabled individual takes on dignity and 'acquires' certain basic rights as a person. No one has the right to be taken care of, no matter how…

Carol Millman, a professional dog trainer, compares ABA to dog training in this powerful expose.

As I have been pointing out for the last few years, the commodification of neurodiversity and the exploitation of autistic people is in full swing. Corporate “Neurodiversity @ Work” and…

Article: Perspectives on Educational Inclusion from a Small Sample of Autistic Pupils in Santiago, Chile

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Because how -- and just as importantly, where -- you offer to help can make all the difference.

September 2021 (updated March 2022) Introduction  PBS is being widely promoted as an approach to be used on people who are disabled and/or neurodivergent and display behaviours others do not wish to see. Often the disabled person has significant sensory, communication, trauma or medical needs and rights that are not met. Despite a broad buy-in,… Read the full article

Rather than the blood ties that may dictate some biological families, found family stories emphasize the connections and communities we cho…

Nick Walker, PhD I wrote this piece back in 2014, because I'd seen so many attempts by others to briefly define autism––in presentations, websites, brochures, academic papers, etc.––and they'd all been dreadful. I decided the world needed some good basic introductory “What Is Autism” text that was: 1.) consistent with current evidence; 2.) not based

Excerpted from NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman. Out now from Avery Books.

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Almost everyone is familiar with the sensation of sunburn. After a day of splashing and fun at the beach, you’re overexposed. Your skin is red and any tiny touch can feel overwhelming. Now, let’s consider the idea of emotional sunburn. This is how some professionals characterize Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD), a condition that often appears […]

The term disability refers to a wide range of bodymind differences that have accrued a variety of social meanings over time, often with negative associations. I use the term bodymind here after Margaret Price, who defines it as a materialist feminist disability studies concept referring to “the imbrication (not just the combination) of the entities usually called ‘body’ and ‘mind’” (2015, 270). The term bodymind highlights how “mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each other” (269), collectively impacting our experiences of ourselves and the world. Discussions of disability include conditions that are physical (like paralysis or amputation), sensory (like blindness or deafness), psychiatric (like depression or schizophrenia), cognitive/intellectual (like Down’s syndrome or autism), and chronic (illnesses and diseases like fibromyalgia or diabetes). Since the early 1990s, however, scholars in disability studies have researched disability as a socially constructed category that cannot be wholly understood through moral or medical models that frame it as a problem to be solved. While disability conceptually overlaps with studies of medicine and health, disability is not the same as health. In disability studies, disability is a social and political category describing bodyminds that depart from the bodily, mental, and/or behavioral norms of a society. Scholars in the field are invested in discovering the history and culture of disabled people as well as how the category of disability has developed and changed over time. Discrimination based on disability is referred to as ableism, while benefits within the (dis)ability system are referred to as ability privilege or able-body/able-mind privilege. Some scholars use terms like (dis)ability, ability/disability, and dis/ability to additionally refer to the overarching social system that determines how bodymind differences are valued or devalued to distinguish this concept from the word disability alone; (dis)ability, ability/disability, and dis/ability, therefore, operate similarly to concepts like gender, race, or sexuality, which also refer to larger systems of privilege and marginalization (Schalk 2018; Garland-Thomson 2002; Goodley 2014). This entry will use (dis)ability to describe the larger social system and disability and ability to describe, respectively, the marginalized and privileged positions within the (dis)ability system.

Leroy Moore is a man of action: poet, community activist, artist, feminist... the list goes on. Spend any time in the crip community and his name will inevitably surface, which should come as no surprise. Moore is a walking archive of disability art and history with a gift for broad networking, ...

This week on our podcast, I talked with a couple different people about the power of reclaiming language. One of those people is disabled writer and activist Caitlin Wood [1].  [1] http://www.caitlin-wood.com/ ...

What's up Bitches!? Ahem. I mean "Hello, distinguished readers of the Bitch community. Pleased to make your acquaintance. How do you do?" My name is Caitlin and this is my new blogging series, "Tales From The Crip." I hope you enjoy it and that we can be friends. Or at the very least, be frenemie...

by Janae Elisabeth

It’s near on impossible to avoid hearing or reading the words High Functioning Autism/Autistic. Regardless of their validity or inadequacy…

I saw this tweet today: Common life strategy for autistic people: achieve/overachieve until burning out and maybe the overachievement will result in enough social and economic capital to see you th…