“Saying ‘be positive’ marginalizes and isolates people,” she said. “I’m autistic, I have depression and anxiety and I’ve been diagnosed with PTSD. It’s not realistic to ask me to conform to these very specific, socially valued emotions.” ‘It’s OK not to be OK’: Minnesota psychologists push back on ‘toxic positivity’ – StarTribune.com “If it works…

Processing space This is the additional time required to process new information or unexpected changes. Compared to non-autistic people, making decisions, responding to questions or accepting suggestions may require longer (Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2020; Vicario et al, 2020). Understanding this aspect of autistic experience and having the patience to wait is invaluable. It may appear…

More recently, I’ve started referring to myself as gendervague, a term coined within the autistic community to refer to a specifically neurodivergent experience of trans/gender identity. For many of us, gender mostly impacts our lives when projected onto us through other people’s assumptions, but holds little intrinsic meaning. Someone who is gendervague cannot separate their…

The kind of vocational education in which I am interested is not one which will “adapt” workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that.  It seems to me that the business of all who would not be educational time-servers is to resist every move in this…

In the name of efficiency, we have increasingly disabled the ability of healthcare, industry, and education to carry out their missions effectively. Labaree, David. The Ironies of Schooling (p. 45). The covid-19 pandemic showed a lot of things that were wrong in American society, including terrible leadership, a frail social safety net, and a lack…

An education is the capacity to author your own life instead of merely accepting the one handed to you. What Does it Mean to Be Educated? – by ASDE Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle…

Anarchism is a political philosophy and practice that opposes all hierarchical power structures along with their justifying dogmas and proposes the unending pursuit of free association, self-determination, and mutual aid as the basis of our society. Our critique of the state is an extension of our critique of hierarchical power structures, or hierarchies, and the…

Prof. Kristen Bottema-Beutel and team (2024) consider the challenges of trying to intervene with ‘problem behaviour’ when there is no agreed definition of what this is. They found that only about 4 out of every 10 studies on ‘problem behaviour’ made an attempt to explain what ‘problem behaviour’ might be.  There were some 67 different…

In phenomenology, embodied attunement refers to the way in which individuals experience the world through their embodied interactions with the environment. This includes the physical, sensory, and emotional aspects of our interactions with the environment. Embodied attunement involves a reciprocal relationship between the body and the environment, where the body is attuned to the environment…

Chomsky uses the term concision to discuss the way mainstream media outlets respond to power. Having concision means that ideas which align with forces of power in our society need no explanation and those that do not align with those forces of power need significant explanation. This allows the narrative of the “state religion” to…

Radical inclusivity goes beyond the idea of accepting differences. It encourages people to work together to dismantle systemic barriers and create neuroqueer spaces where everyone has freedom to embrace cognitive and somatic liberty. Radical inclusivity starts with inclusion safety and develops through continuous acts of neuroqueering in pursuit of cognitive and somatic liberty. Note: We’re…