Supporting autistic refugees in the UK using the HOPE(S) model
Open Society
Educational ideology and the autistic learner
Learning About Neurodiversity at School: A feasibility study of a new classroom programme for mainstream primary schools - Alyssa M. Alcorn, Sarah McGeown, William Mandy, Dinah Aitken, Sue Fletcher-Watson, 2024
Neurodivergent children educated in mainstream classrooms too often face poor outcomes compared to neurotypical peers. These may be caused, or exacerbated, by t...
Caught Between Tears and Stoicism
Neurodiverse individuals face conflicting expectations about emotional expression. Gus Walz's story reveals the bias and challenges around being authentic.
Disability Sensitivity Training Video
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
AI worse than humans in every way at summarising information, government trial finds
A test of AI for Australia's corporate regulator found that the technology might actually make more work for people, not less.
Artificial intelligence is worse than humans in every way at summarising documents and might actually create additional work for people, a government trial of the technology has found.
These reviewers overwhelmingly found that the human summaries beat out their AI competitors on every criteria and on every submission, scoring an 81% on an internal rubric compared with the machine’s 47%.
Human summaries ran up the score by significantly outperforming on identifying references to ASIC documents in the long document, a type of task that the report notes is a “notoriously hard task” for this type of AI. But humans still beat the technology across the board.
Speculative Care Futures
Speculative Care Futures is a report written from the perspective of of an imagined social care facility providing day services for adults described as having Profound and Multiple Learning Disabil…
Core Principles
The Core Principles of Media Literacy Education illuminate the dynamics between individuals, media, and structures that shape our world.
Analysis of definitions of media literacy
This study provides an analysis of how the term “media literacy” has been defined by authors of articles published in the Journal of Media Literacy Education. It generates answers to two questions: (1) To what extent does there appear to be a shared meaning for the term “media literacy” across authors who publish articles on this topic, and (2) When authors cite definitions of media literacy, which sources do they use most often? The findings of this content analysis reveal that there are a great many definitions being used for media literacy as well as a large number of sources being cited for those definitions. This study uncovered more than 400 definitional elements, which were then organized into a six-category scheme that reflects the full span of thinking exhibited by authors of the 210 articles published in this journal.
YouTube and the Death of Media Literacy
Sign up to Milanote for free with no time-limit: https://milanote.com/zoebee Media literacy is dead. ...or so I thought. Come with me as I recount ...
Neurodivergent-designed and neurodivergent-led peer support in school: A feasibility and acceptability study of the neurodivergent peer support toolkit (NEST) - Catherine J Crompton, Francesca Fotheringham, Katie Cebula, Charlotte Webber, Sarah Foley, Sue Fletcher-Watson, 2024
Most neurodivergent students attend mainstream schools; however, it can be difficult to make and keep friends, and it is common for neurodivergent people to fee...
Self diagnosed adult autism resources handout 9 22 22
Predictive validity of self-report questionnaires in the assessment of autism spectrum disorders in adults - PubMed
While various screening instruments for autism spectrum disorders are widely used in diagnostic assessments, their psychometric properties have not been simultaneously evaluated in the outpatient setting where these instruments are used most. In this study, we tested the Ritvo Autism Asperger Diagno …
The positive predictive values indicate that these tests correctly identified autism spectrum disorder patients in almost 80% of the referred cases. However, the negative predictive values suggest that only half of the referred patients without autism spectrum disorder were correctly identified. The sensitivity and specificity of each of these instruments were much lower than the values reported in the literature. In this study, the sensitivity of the Ritvo Autism Asperger Diagnostic Scale-Revised was the highest (73%), and the Autism-Spectrum Quotient short forms had the highest specificity (70% and 72%).
Understanding the Self-identification of Autism in Adults: a Scoping Review - Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders
Adults are increasingly self-identifying as autistic, and reporting problems being referred for an autism diagnostic assessment. This scoping review aims to ascertain: (1) what research has been conducted on the self-identification process of autism in adults, who do and do not have a formal diagnosis of autism, and (2) which aspects of the self-identification process could be used to improve the referral and the diagnostic process of an adult autism assessment. The main themes identified were: the diagnostic process from a client´s perspective; the process of self-identifying as autistic from a lifespan perspective; an autistic identity; sexual identity and experiences, and the perception of autism as a difference or a disability. These themes could positively enhance the referral and diagnostic process.
Sylvia Duckworth on Instagram: "“Intersectionality” is a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to help explain how one’s identity markers intersect and effect one’s life experiences. The markers in this drawing are not complete as I was limited by space. What’s missing?"
1,201 likes, 23 comments - sylviaduckworth on August 9, 2020: "“Intersectionality” is a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to help explain how one’s identity markers intersect and effect one’s life experiences. The markers in this drawing are not complete as I was limited by space. What’s missing?".
Barriers to healthcare and a ‘triple empathy problem’ may lead to adverse outcomes for autistic adults: A qualitative study - Sebastian CK Shaw, Laura Carravallah, Mona Johnson, Jane O’Sullivan, Nicholas Chown, Stuart Neilson, Mary Doherty, 2024
Autistic people experience more co-occurring health conditions and, on average, die younger than non-autistic people. Despite growing awareness of health inequi...
Exploring Autistic Sexualities, Relationality, and Genders: Living Under a Double Rainbow
This edited collection of contributions explores non-normative genders, sexualities, and relationality among Autistic people.
Written within an explicitly neuro-affirmative frame, the collection celebrates the diversity and richness of Autistic identity, sexuality, gender, and relationships, exploring areas such as consent, embodiment, ink, kink, sex education, and therapeutic work. All editors and contributors are neurodivergent and members of the communities that the book focuses on, providing
Playful Communication Part 3: Wordplay
Previously I’ve written about the importance of recognising and valuing different forms of communication and the need for us to allow for expressive as well as functional communication. In this pie…
Communal Space as an autistic person or: What’s the big deal about other people?
For a long time I didn’t really understand what the big deal was about being with other people. Yes, they could be funny, kind and interesting. But frankly, as far as I was concerned, I was already…
A true communal space or experience is one where people can be themselves, together.
A true communal space is life changing. It’s motivating, it’s energising, it makes you feel valued. I feel it most when I spend time with other autistic people and feel free of needing to censor myself or change who I am. But I should be able to do this in the wider world too. I meet children who’ve maybe never even been able to do this, being with other people is still just something difficult, painful and suffocating. They are constantly compromising and it exhausts them. But it doesn’t have to be this way and i don’t think they should have to wait until their an adult to figure that out. We can work to create these spaces for them as well as ourselves.
Autistic Shape Making
This is what I’m currently calling my ongoing work in figuring out ways to describe, name, visualise and generally communicate autistic ways of being particularly autistic ways of playing, co…
A phenomenological exploration of the lived experience of adults experiencing pathological demand avoidance
Speculative Care Futures – Independent Arts Projects
U.S. Gender and Disability Justice Alliance - Women Enabled International
Who We Are The U.S. Gender and Disability Justice Alliance (USGDJA or the Alliance) is a new disability justice-oriented collective convening women, nonbinary persons, and other gender minorities with disabilities from across the United States together to take action on issues important to our community. Mission Statement We aim to educate policymakers, related human and […]
U.S. Gender and Disability Justice Alliance – Medium
Read writing from U.S. Gender and Disability Justice Alliance on Medium. Advocating for rights and justice at the intersection of disability and gender.
Wildlife Photographer of the Year: Manatee mother and calf
The photo is among several highly commended in this year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest
An algal bloom in the area had caused a decline in the eelgrass beds that provide them with food, but the local community restored the habitat, resulting in more manatees being recorded than ever before.
How to reduce video call fatigue
The Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) has released an interesting study of the stressors that come with video calls, and outlined potential solutions that can help. The research is alre…
The toll of America's anti-trans war
To understand how the anti-trans agenda could reshape all of our lives, The 19th set out to examine how the laws and rhetoric behind it are impacting Americans.
Breaking the stigma around autism: moving away from neuronormativity using epistemic justice and 4E cognition - Synthese
Autistic people continue to face considerable stigmatization. Much work remains to be done to identify and tackle the causes of this stigmatization. We identify two related assumptions that generate and perpetuate this stigmatization: one ontological; one epistemic. We argue that breaking the stigma around autism requires addressing these twin assumptions. The ontological assumption presupposes the pathologization of autism as a disorder. Addressing this first assumption requires taking neurodiversity seriously and moving away from neuronormativity. The epistemic assumption posits that “allistics-know-best” and prevents allistics from acknowledging the epistemic limits of their own perspective. Addressing this second assumption requires centering Autistics’ perspectives and experiences in the production, dissemination, and use of knowledge about Autistics. To make our case against these two problematic assumptions, we draw on the key epistemological notions of standpoint, ignorance, and epistemic injustice—which have implications for all fields that concern minoritized groups and the contents produced about or with them. Fruitfully connecting our original pluralist conception of epistemic agency (which centers crucial experiential knowledge beyond mere propositional knowledge) to 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enacted), we identify a new category of epistemic injustice: ecological epistemic injustice. We then illustrate the importance of addressing the widespread yet problematic ontological and epistemic assumptions underlying the stigmatization of autism by turning to the case of applied behavioral analysis (ABA), which instantiates both neuronormativity and epistemic injustice.
Flow State: Applying the Theory in the SEN Classroom
Flow state, as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is a mental state of operation where a person is fully immersed in an activity
Damian Milton is a British academic who has expanded on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow state, particularly in relation to neurodivergent individuals. His theory suggests that flow state can be achieved by anyone, regardless of neurodivergent or neurotypical status, but the conditions necessary for flow vary between individuals.
Milton suggests that flow state is achieved when a person’s skills and abilities match the demands of the task at hand, but that the specific conditions necessary for flow may vary depending on an individual’s neurotype. For example, neurodivergent individuals may require different levels of stimulation, novelty, or predictability in order to achieve flow.
Milton emphasises the importance of context in achieving flow state, arguing that the environment and social conditions can greatly impact a person’s ability to achieve flow. For example, social and environmental barriers may prevent individuals from accessing flow, while supportive and accommodating environments may facilitate flow.
https://ndconnection.co.uk/blog/researchroundup — Neurodiverse Connection
In this month’s research roundup Ann picks out some of the current big debates on Autistic lives, and showcases new and important research from teams and academics working within the field.