Before Maslow’s Hierarchy: The Whitewashing of Indigenous Knowledge
For the last few months, I’ve been wincing a bit every time I see a
Open Society
Neuro-Holographic
I believe that the DEEP (Double Empathy Extreme Problem) is at the heart of all the systemic ableist issues we have in our education…
Systems: What does a board of directors do? - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity
The only thing you should be doing is improving your operations and culture, and that will give you the ability to use AI if it ever becomes relevant. Everyone is talking about Retrieval Augmented Generation, but most companies don't actually have any internal documentation worth retrieving. Fix. Your. Shit.
I cannot emphasize this enough. You either need to be on the absolute cutting-edge and producing novel research, or you should be doing exactly what you were doing five years ago with minor concessions to incorporating LLMs. Anything in the middle ground does not make any sense unless you actually work in the rare field where your industry is being totally disrupted right now.
Identity Politics and Elite Capture - Boston Review
The wealthy and powerful will take every opportunity to hijack activist energies for their own ends.
The Future of Neurodiversity - Boston Review
The movement has made important progress, but focusing on rights and representation leaves too many behind.
In the United States, the policing of “normal” affective responses to such horrors is also a form of neuronormative domination.
Instead of working to grant some individuals success in reformed institutions, Neurodivergent Power would place our sights squarely on our collective ability to resist the entire economic system that disables and discriminates against us.
This must be part of a broader effort to foster neurodivergent consciousness-raising through the development of cultural institutions. Consider the importance of neurodiversity studies departments in universities, not to mention mad studies and disability studies departments. While universities have been using neurodiversity vocabularies to rebrand existing institutions, true neurodiversity studies departments do not yet exist. Yet they will be vital for unearthing suppressed histories of neurodivergence, for the development of political theories of neurodivergent emancipation, and for aiding in the development of a mass neurodivergent consciousness. Such consciousness is not merely about neurodivergent pride, but instead must show how neuronormativity relates to the material base and social relations of the world system of global capitalism. The sites of so much contemporary struggle—over war, incarceration, borders, homelessness, and workers’ unions—need an awareness to ground ever increasing solidarity between neurodivergent people and other groups facing domination in the same system.
Just as vitally, a politics of Neurodivergent Power must make more efforts to connect the oppression of neurodivergent people to anti-imperialist, decolonial, and abolitionist efforts globally, much as the Black Power movement did. This entails more than simply recognizing that intersectionality is important, as many proponents of Liberal Neurodiversity already assert. It entails collective organizing and movement building to put intersectionality into practice. While the potential members and needs of such a movement are highly diverse, it is also true that similar forms of neurodivergent disablement are evident across the globe.
Ultimately, a politics of neurodiversity that is for everyone is a politics of Neurodivergent Power. This means collective resistance to the production of normal subjectivity, debility, and disablement, to fight for a freer future that meets all of our needs. Individually, we are disabled; united, we hold a form of strength that could help us achieve collective liberation.
Elijah the Rainbow Dream Dragon.
He's under a CC BY-NC licence so y'all are welcome to use him for whatever you like provided it's non-commercial.
I'm also working on a fullbody reference drawing for his boyfriend as well. Keep an…
Horatio the Rainbow Dream Dragon.
Like his BF Elijah, he's under a CC BY-NC licence so you can use him for whatever you like provided it's non-commercial. He's here just to spread the love and happiness! 💖
Elijah:
He's under a CC…
‘You must know this story’: Why Freedom Summer’s murders matter today
During the 1964 effort to register Black Mississippians to vote, the Klan killed three civil rights activists. The atrocity still reveberates.
Chi08 mark
Another account hits the news of a school implementing extremely controlling behavioural policies, in the name of turning the school around.
All these pieces report similar approaches - immediate detentions escalating quickly to isolation for minor infractions, including…
— Naomi Fisher (@naomicfisher)
Dripping Springs Pride organizers say signs to promote this weekend's festival were vandalized
Organizers said the festival will still go on as planned with safety measures in place.
Why We Need More Autistic Health Care Professionals and How to Support Them | Autism in Adulthood
Many autistic characteristics (especially attention to detail, social nonconformity, monotropism, and knowledge of autism) set autistic health care professionals apart as especially well-suited for their fields. Increasing the number of autistic health care professionals will benefit their clients, colleagues, and health care fields as a whole. Autistic health care professionals face many challenges, including being misunderstood and discouraged from participating in their fields. Despite the challenges, many health care professionals are thriving. Autistic connections and solidarity are an important part of helping autistic health care professionals overcome obstacles and succeed. Suggestions for making health care more accommodating of autistic people are offered. Recommendations are also provided for autistic health care professionals looking to find community and meet others in the same position.
Creating Safety for Autistic Folk
A bright, 11-page infographic about how to Create Safety for Autistic Folk.This resource is suitable for parents, educators. or any adult who works with Autistic people.This resource may be printed and displayed in clinics, classrooms, or other locations. It may be printed and shared with educators,...
To Whoever’s in Charge - AJ Wilkerson
This is not a Comedy Special.
I went off-script recently during a show at Helium Comedy Club in Portland and decided to just speak from my heart about my mental health, being diagnosed Autistic at 30, and medical marijuana.
I hope some of this makes you laugh, but more importantly I want it to make you all think, feel, and then take action in the federal legalization of marijuana and in mental health awareness.
Recorded on December 11th, 2021
Rethinking Social Communication Support: Exploring Communication Partner Training for Autistic Adults and Their Neurotypical Communication Partners | Autism in Adulthood
Autistic and neurotypical people often have difficulty communicating effectively with one another and understanding each other's experiences. Despite evidence that communication breakdowns occur at the interactional level, most social communication interventions focus only on behaviors to be changed by autistic adults, and rely heavily on teaching neurotypical social skills. In this Perspective, we draw on our experiences as a mixed-neurotype team of clinicians, researchers, and advocates to argue that a new framework for social communication support is needed. Specifically, we propose that communication partner training (CPT), an umbrella term for programs that teach strategies to people with communication differences and communication partners alike, is an appropriate framework to guide future social communication support for autistic adults and their neurotypical communication partners. We provide an overview of how CPT is currently used with adults with acquired communication differences (e.g., aphasia, traumatic brain injury) and their communication partners. We highlight three key components of such programs: (i) promoting increased knowledge and understanding of communication differences and each person's unique communication profile; (ii) adapting the communication environment; (iii) and identifying collaborative strategies that people with communication differences and their communication partners can use to foster meaningful interactions. We acknowledge that there are important fundamental differences between autistic adults and people with acquired communication differences; however, we propose that CPT can be used to inform social communication support for autistic adults and their neurotypical communication partners. We provide recommendations for future CPT program development within autism research. Some recommendations include the need to acknowledge each person's intersecting identities and the dynamic impact of intrinsic and extrinsic factors on communication. We also recommend future research to explore ways that CPT can be applied to newly diagnosed autistic adults, as well as autistic youth, and their communication partners. Finally, we highlight the importance of foregrounding future program development in the lived experience of autistic adults and their communication partners.
Drs. Dawn Prince-Hughes and Nick Walker on Neuroexpansive Embodiment, Autistic Movement, and Culture
CASY Cultural Autism Studies (The Ethnography Project led by Dr. Dawn Prince-Hughes) has officially restarted for 2023! We are pleased to share our conversa...
The Unique Responsibility of Neuroexpansive Minds for Cultural Inclusion
We have a unique responsibility to include other neurodivergent minds in commodified bodies in our movement toward cultural inclusion.
As an advocate for those with neuroexpansive minds in bodies that have become commodified bodies, I have come to understand, over the years, that a piecemeal approach to the valuing of difference and extensions of freedoms for all designated expendable in modern culture depends on every such movement to band together. A veteran of many social justice movements, it is clear that as we celebrate the crumbs we seek, we have failed to see that without a root transformation, a society founded on horrendous casual cruelty will simply close ranks after one group or another is finally “accepted.” But as Abraham Lincoln famously quoted, “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves….” I believe this especially true of those who’s very innate sensitivities and connections are responsible for them being pushed out of the cultural sphere in the first place.
Modern neurotypical humans, in the history of all life on the planet, are the only ones who have ever engaged in the kinds of enslavement, torture, greed, and insatiable appetite for killing we face now. Only the basest hubris would see these developments as progress. From my perspective, modern humanity are the “neurodivergent” ones. I would argue that what is currently called neurodivergence – expansive sensitivities, processing styles that include every part of the environment, a sense of kinship with living things – are actually the natural state of a reality imbued with consciousness.
Modern, connectively truncated influence has driven an obsession with homogeneity, and increasingly raised a maniacal rejection of inward and outward difference to a hellish art form. The lives (and deaths) of sentient, neuroexpansive beings is foundational to daily life and underscores the danger of using gifts evolutionarily tooled for a better, more compassionate future are pressed into service for the structure we were put here to change.
What disturbed me, beyond envisioning pigs crammed into dark, poorly ventilated warehouses, desperate for natural food, was my autistic colleague’s lack of moral reflection on the fact that such an action by an animal is inarguably evidence that they possess neuroexpansive minds that are ignored because there is social and monetary benefit in continuing to see them only as bodies to make money from. My colleague’s attitude struck me as some kind of neurological Stockholm Syndrome, reflecting that the ability to compartmentalize, dismiss suffering, and commodify other sentient beings is an evolutionary trademark of the neurotruncated power structure, not the flowering of the sensitivity and connection that is at our core.
Unable to see shades of lived nuance and constitutionally lacking organs of exquisite sensitivity, the truncated, neurotypical gaze rakes over the bodies of neuroexpansive life – whether designated autistic, animal, any other undesirable caste, or nature itself – they assess them only in terms of cost, threats, or utility. They can’t or won’t see them.
In mimicking neurotruncated behavior, we have been able to ignore not just the suffering of farmed animals. We have been complicit in the reality that 70% of all indigenous animals have been wiped out in the last 50 years. And as Covid loosens its grip on the world, it is easy to forget that it, like N1H1, SARS, Ebola, Bird Flu, and Swine Flu, we’re all the result of humans demanding to eat the bodies of others with different minds – farmed and free – at a pace and volume that cages stacked in barns and wet markets become petri dish prisons because a monolithic, neuro-retentive pathology continues unchecked. The lungs of the living planet are scorched and wheezing in the ashes of the Amazon and the coals of the Congo fires set to clear land for more sentient animals to be raised as saleable bodies, a planet-wide gas chamber. Fires, droughts, dust storms, ocean acidification, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires – all happening at an historically unprecedented intensity.
I believe we are constitutionally, and rightly, more sensitive to this kind of compartmentalized dissonance and the suffering it compounds. We are becoming proud that we see things holistically, without arbitrary cultural filters. It is a gift that accounts for our ability to make clear connections between disparate phenomena, and to draw complex lines between one concept and another in ways unfathomable to more truncated minds. This state of natural connection should also give us a unique empathy and solidarity with all minds who are trying to kick their way out of boxes and chains, literally and socially.
We can start a new, inclusive movement by leading the way back to the primal awareness, the connective wisdom, we were born with, because we are first and foremost, in all ways that matter, neuroexpansive minds.
@erin.claiming_disability • "Weaponized Accessibility" (AND YES IT HAPPENS OFTEN) So "Weaponized Accessibility," is when a b... • Threads
Grey rock method: What it is and how to use it effectively
The grey rock method involves becoming unresponsive to abusive or manipulative behavior so that the perpetrator will lose interest.
@jonbrosio • Everyone says, "Learn marketing – it's the world's most powerful skill." But where the hell do... • Threads
A Materialist History of Pathology and Neurodiversity: A Conversation with Robert Chapman
Robert Chapman, PhD is a philosopher and social theorist specializing in disability and mental health.
How "Autism Warrior Parents" Harm Autistic Kids — THINKING PERSON'S GUIDE TO AUTISM
Autism Warrior Parents refuse to accept their autistic child’s actual reality and needs, and instead focus on their children's "damage."
Ford Airport one of first airports to use sign language boards powered by AI
The Grand Rapids airport is one of the first in the nation to try out new technology powered by AI that is being used successfully at train stations in the United Kingdom.
Floridians with disabilities have a new legal pathway to make their own decisions • Florida Phoenix
For years, Democratic Rep. Allison Tant of Tallahassee has tried to pass a law so other parents don’t have to make the same decision she did: Put their adult children with disabilities under guardianship. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed that law on Friday, establishing a new legal pathway for Floridians with disabilities to remain autonomous while […]
Kids are losing 'huge chunks' of their childhood to long COVID. Too many are being told it's 'all in their head'
They're losing their formative years to this debilitating disease. But for too many children with long COVID, finding help is a frustrating and traumatic process that leaves them feeling isolated and invisible.
Not Taking Bad Advice: a Pedagogical Model
Best practices, which aim to standardize teaching and flatten the differences between students, are anathema to pedagogy.
The Web We Need To Give Students
“Giving students their own digital domain is a radical act. It gives them the ability to work on the Web and with the Web.”
Thomas Pynchon
TRANSFORMATIVE SOMATIC PRACTICES AND AUTISTIC POTENTIALS: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC EXPLORATION