Research is not neutral. It never was.
Who conducts it, who funds it, who it centers, who it harms, who it ignores — these are political choices dressed up in methodological language. The disability industry profits from studies that treat us as problems to be solved. Education research operationalizes children into data points. Psychology pathologizes divergence. And the people most affected rarely get to ask the questions.
This series is our response.
Facts, Fire, and Feels brings together research, critique, and storytelling from the edges of knowledge production. We read the literature. We name the harms. We amplify the studies that treat us as whole people. We reject the ones that don’t. We follow the evidence where it leads and hold the industry accountable where it doesn’t.
The title is deliberate. Facts matter — we take evidence seriously and cite our sources. Fire matters — we are angry about what gets funded, what gets published, and what gets done to our communities in the name of science. Feels matter — lived experience is data, testimony is evidence, and the people closest to harm are the most qualified to name it.
This is not a literature review. It is a reckoning.
The Series
Facts, Fire, and Feels: Research-Storytelling from the Edges
The index page. An orientation to how we read, what we look for, and why we’re here. Research is political. Evidence has a positionality. And the people at the edges have always known things the mainstream gets around to confirming decades later.
Questions for an Industry: Are You Disregarding Harm and Profiting From Our Misery?
The disability-industrial complex runs on compliance, cure-seeking, and deficit framing. Researchers study us without us. Interventions erase us in the name of helping us. Funders reward studies that treat autistic and neurodivergent people as burdens rather than people. This section asks the hard questions about who benefits — and who pays.
Participatory, Emancipatory, Activist Research
There is another way to do research. Participatory approaches put disabled people in the driver’s seat — not as subjects, but as co-investigators, question-setters, and interpreters of their own lives. Emancipatory research exists to dismantle oppression, not document it. Activist research creates knowledge in service of liberation. This section maps what that looks like and why it matters.
Useful Autism Research: Welcome to This Very Important Update
Not all research is harmful. Some of it changes things. Some of it names what we already knew but couldn’t yet prove. Some of it hands us language, evidence, and leverage. This section collects the studies that help — the ones that take neurodivergent people seriously, center our experiences, and point toward better support rather than better compliance.
How We Engage with Research
We apply the neurodiversity paradigm, not the pathology paradigm. We ask whose voices are centered and whose are missing. We look for participatory methods, community partnerships, and researcher positionality statements. We flag studies that use harmful proxy measures, that treat non-speaking as non-thinking, or that optimize for neurotypical comfort at neurodivergent expense.
We cite. We question. We hold the tension between “the evidence says” and “the evidence was produced by a system that wanted certain answers.”
The people at the edges — disabled people, neurodivergent people, mad people, multiply-marginalized people — have always known things the mainstream gets around to confirming decades later. We are done waiting for permission to trust that knowledge.
Broken systems, not broken people. The research is how we prove it.
