Kristina Brooke Daniele is a Black, queer, neurodivergent homeschooling mom, educator, wife, and author of two books, (Civil Rights Then and Now and i wandered, lost: poems). Kristina has worked as an educator in some capacity for over 15 years- first as a classroom teacher, then as a homeschooling teacher, and currently, as an education consultant. She is passionate about collaborative projects centering on creating and maintaining safe-spaces for those who have for too long been pushed aside. During her time at Automattic, Kristina spearheaded the creation of the Employee Resource Group, Cocoamattic for Black employees at the company.

Kristina enjoys reading speculative fiction, write tales of romance, build homes and design apartments in The Sims 4, peacefully commune with ancient lands in Age of Empires, dabble in various arts and crafts, and spend time with her family.

• CONFERENCE TO RESTORE HUMANITY! 2022: SYSTEM REBOOT TRACK 3/4 DIY AT THE EDGES Surviving the Bipartisanship of Behaviorism by Rolling Our Own July 25 – 28
• Naked Words Podcast: How Black Writers are Changing the Stories Told About Us
• Anti-Racism Resources from The iBelieve Foundation
• Misogynoir Nearly Killed Meghan Markle by Mo
• Under the Mango Tree Black Girl Magic Chat
• Black History Month Reading List from Mango Publishing
• Get Drunk, Get Woke: Cancel Culture
• The Rashad Mills Show w/ Kristina Brooke Daniele
• Black Heroes Of The American Revolution Activities And Lesson Plan
• All About Kwanzaa For Kids
• Civil Rights Supreme Court Cases Every Child Should Know
• Learn About Juneteenth For Kids: A Celebration Of Freedom
• 10 Black Women Pioneers To Know For Black History Month
• Sukey And The Mermaid Lesson Plan and Activities
• Ray Charles By Sharon Bell Mathis – Lesson Plan And Worksheets
• Anansi The Spider Lesson Plan And Activities
• The People Could Fly Lesson Plan
• Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters Lesson Plan and Activities
•  Wrinkle In Time Reading Comprehension Worksheets

• What I need may be different than what other people need, and that is OK. Everyone has things they need to thrive at school and in their life.
• Fairness in school isn’t always about being treated the same or getting the same things.
• Sometimes, it can be fair for people to get or to do different things than their classmates, because they don’t have the same needs. Being treated fairly helps us be able to do our best at school.
• Due to their learning and thinking, some neurodivergent students may do things differently in the classroom. What helps one person may not help another—neurodivergent people are very different from each other too.

Learning About Neurodiversity at School (LEANS) | The University of Edinburgh

Tall Poppy Syndrome, the politics of resentment, fundamental attribution error, and sameness-based notions of fairness are a systemic slog for neurodivergent and disabled people. We really appreciate this video from LEANS explaining fairness.

Video: Explaining Fairness (LEANS resource 5.3) – Media Hopper Create

LEANS introduces a balance scale metaphor for fairness.

In this story, Mr. Oliver introduces a new metaphor for fairness, the balance scale. He is trying to address concerns that classroom changes or additional supports give some pupils an advantage over others (i.e. are actively disadvantaging classmates). The point of the balance scale is to suggest that supports may help “even things up” rather than putting some people ahead of others. People getting or doing apparently “extra” things may be making school more fair, not less.

In a given situation, we have both challenges (needs) and tools to address them (skills, information, strategies, supports). Some of the challenges and tools will be shared across the class—but some people will face challenges their peers do not. To “balance out” these challenges, people need more tools too. In the story, the example is a dyspraxic character’s handwriting challenges being “balanced out” by typing the work.

Mr. Oliver reminds the class that the example is about one person in one situation. People’s scales will differ from one another, and each person would have a different scales in a different situations (for example, sports, maths, or art rather than a book report). Different situations make different demands on us—and our available tools and coping capacity can vary too.

Learning About Neurodiversity at School (LEANS) | The University of Edinburgh

Fairness and school isn’t always about being treated the same, or getting the same things. Sometimes, it can be fair for people to get or to do different things than their classmates. This is because we don’t all have the same needs. Our needs, and other people’s needs, aren’t always things that we can see from the outside. Differences might be on the inside, and have to do with how we think, feel and learn. Neurodiversity is a word that sums up these kinds of inside differences. Some people may get all the support they need from how things are usually done at school. Other people have differences in the way they learn, think, or do things, and this means they need other kinds of tools or support. They might get additional help from adults, go out of class for breaks, or have something to fidget with during lessons. There are many kinds of help and support people may have at school. The same thing won’t help every person. Just like giving out glasses to the whole class wouldn’t help every person! We won’t always know what other people’s needs are, or why we see people doing things differently at school. People don’t have to share that information with us, and we don’t have to tell everyone about our needs either. We can respect others by believing that they are telling the truth about their needs. They can respect us by believing us too. Next time you see that people aren’t doing the same things as you at school, and want to say “it isn’t fair!” pause, and think. Maybe that difference between what you’re doing and they’re doing is making things more fair, not less fair. When we get what we need, we won’t all be treated the same, because we’re not the same. Being treated fairly lets all of us try our best at school.

Explaining Fairness (LEANS resource 5.3)

Props to the LEANS Team for the quotes and images used above. Stimpunks recommends LEANS to all educators.

©2022, The LEANS Team. Alyssa Alcorn, Sue Fletcher-Watson, Sarah McGeown, Fergus Murray, Dinah Aitken, Liam Peacock, & William Mandy assert their right to be identified as the authors of this handbook and associated downloadable materials.  

Illustrations ©Claire Hubbard 2022

The handbook and associated LEANS materials are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. 

Terms of use | The University of Edinburgh

With this in mind, my purpose is to argue that when it comes to issues surrounding poverty and economic justice the preparation of teachers must be first and foremost an ideological endeavour, focused on adjusting fundamental understandings not only about educational outcome disparities but also about poverty itself. I will argue that it is only through the cultivation of what I call a structural ideology of poverty and economic justice that teachers become equity literate (Gorski 2013), capable of imagining the sorts of solutions that pose a genuine threat to the existence of class inequity in their classrooms and schools.

Poverty and the ideological imperative: a call to unhook from deficit and grit ideology and to strive for structural ideology in teacher education

The Direct Confrontation Principle: The path to equity requires direct confrontations with inequity—with interpersonal, institutional, cultural and structural racism and other forms of oppression. “Equity” approaches that fail to directly identify and confront inequity play a significant role in sustaining inequity.

Basic Principles for Equity Literacy

The Prioritization Principle: In order to achieve equity we must prioritize the interests of the students and families whose interests historically have not been prioritized. Every policy, practice, and program decision should be considered through the question, “What impact is this going to have on the most marginalized students and families? How are we prioritizing their interests?”

Basic Principles for Equity Literacy

The “Fix Injustice, Not Kids” Principle: Educational outcome disparities are not the result of deficiencies in marginalized communities’ cultures, mindsets, or grittiness, but rather of inequities. Equity initiatives focus, not on “fixing” students and families who are marginalized, but on transforming the conditions that marginalize students and families.

Basic Principles for Equity Literacy

Avoid These Equity Pitfalls:

1. Universal Validation – Not all ideas and perspectives are equitable. We don’t want to validate someone’s racist perspective. Equity is not about universal validation.
2. Equity Detours: Addressing Equity Problems with Cultural Solutions – There is no path toward equity that does not involve a direct confrontation with inequity.
3. Lack of Leadership – The people with the most equity literacy have to be the people with the most power.
4. Going at the Pace of the Most Resistant – We are prioritizing the comfort of the people who are most resistant instead of prioritizing the discomfort the most marginalized people in the institution experience.
5. Doing What’s Popular Instead of Doing What’s Effective
6. Embracing a Deficit Ideology Instead of a Structural Ideology – If your equity initiatives are about fixing marginalized people rather than about addressing the conditions that marginalize people, there’s no way to get to equity.

Equity Pitfalls

Major Pain is created by Jesse Mercury, a content creator with a long history of undiagnosed illness. His podcasting career started in 2015 on a show called SciFi with Jesse Mercury, which evolved into Space Nerds before being put to rest. As Jesse’s health declined he switched gears to launch the Major Pain podcast in 2021, seeking to find community around his health challenges. In 2023 he finally uncovered the mystery driving his long illness when he was diagnosed with mast cell activation syndrome and small fiber neuropathy, made possible in large part by what he learned from hosting Major Pain. He is now seeing improvement in his health for the first time in years, as he learns to integrate his diagnoses into his life.

Major Pain: A Podcast About Chronic Illness and Disability

The Disability Economic Justice Policy Framework is intended to be used by all and shared widely as a guide for policy development. Its applicability includes federal policy making in Congress, the White House, and across federal agencies; at the state and local levels; as well as at policy and advocacy organizations that shape policy making. Whether you are an advocate, policymaker, funder, practitioner, or researcher, the goal is to find yourself within the framework and use the values it articulates to bring a disability policy lens to your work.

Source: How to Embed a Disability Economic Justice Policy Framework in Domestic Policy Making

• $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people – Los Angeles Times
• Denver Basic Income Project’s cash has saved lives, homeless participants say
• Thanks to $500 a month of basic income for six months, homelessness reduced by two-thirds
• Providing $7500 each to 50 homeless people resulted in a savings of $8100 per person according to new unconditional cash grant experiment
• Robust COVID Relief Achieved Historic Gains Against Poverty and Hardship, Bolstered Economy | Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

CW: medical trauma, medical ableism

I remember laying there, remembering that this experience I’m having is like the other times that I almost died.

And I can feel my life slipping away.

Is it worth it for me to call out and have someone save me?

That’s how traumatized that I’ve been by being in hospitals and in medical settings.

And I need for doctors and healthcare professionals to understand that many of us are traumatized like that.

It’s not abnormal for people like myself who have chronic illnesses, who have cancer, and have high touch and high interactions with medical professionals, to feel traumatized, to feel, is it worth it for me to go and get help for this experience that I’m having, for the possibility that something major is wrong?

Because for some of us waiting to see is worth the risk of possibly dying.

That’s how much we are no longer emotionally prepared to go to the hospital.

That’s how bad a physical experience it is for some of us.

Tinu Abayomi-Paul – YouTube

During the hospital experience, I dealt with racism, I dealt with sexism.

The first doctor I had was fantastic, but they rotated him out.

And the rest of my experience, I had to fight every single day to be heard and understood and to get better care.

I didn’t have my chronic illnesses properly addressed, I didn’t have any of my neurodiversities taken into consideration at all, nor my comfort.

It was a hellish experience towards the end.

And I finally decided I just need to get out of there.

Tinu Abayomi-Paul – YouTube

#MedTwitter is shocked that disabled & chronically ill folks identify as their conditions because they’ve never actually been exposed to us except in medical textbooks & clinics. They don’t take #DisabilityStudies classes. They don’t socialize with us. They don’t listen to us.

Karrie Higgins

Which means THEY actually reduce us to “nothing but our conditions” far more than we do. #MedTwitter But hey, wouldn’t want to tell the good doctors they’re ignorant.

Karrie Higgins

Bodies ride the waves
Somebody's gonna have to pay
Bodies, living on the shore in their sandcastles
Bodies, sea is getting rough and the walls rattle
Bodies, come with the tide
Nowhere left to hide
Bodies
Bodies

A thousand thoughts ride the waves
Can't save nobody, I'm too late
Bodies, no one cares about the coming last battle
Bodies, wavеs crashing down and the ocean swallows
Bodies
Whеre you gonna hide the bodies?
Bodies
Hey-oh-hey-oh

On the shore living in sandcastles
No one cares about the coming last battle
Sea is getting rough and the walls rattle
Waves crashing down and the ocean swallows
Bodies
Bodies

--Bodies by Rabbit Junk

The instant, almost the very instant, you become disabled, you cease to be seen as a reliable narrator of your own story to literally everybody else, except for disabled people.

Every single ableist stereotype that you’ve heard for your entire life that you’ve never evaluated, that will be the lens through which other people see you, including people that know you.

This is one of the many reasons why people need to do anti-ableism work. Because every single thing you hate about us, you will hate about yourself. And becoming us is a lot easier than you think it is.

Imani Barbarin, MAGC | Crutches&Spice

• We believe you.
• You’re not alone. 
• The wellness industry is gaslighting you.
• It’s not your fault.
• You are worthy of compassion.
• Medical bias is real.
• The way we see medicine practiced on television is a fantasy.
• We believe that you have a problem.
• We are angry and grieving too.
• Talking to other people who know what this feels like has changed everything for us.
• It’s okay to feel joy when your body is hurting.
• Feeling joy doesn’t undermine how much you are struggling. 
• It’s okay if you haven’t found any joy in your struggle at all.
• Your story doesn’t need a neat and tidy ending. 
• Somebody out there is yearning for a story just like yours that is honest about pain or maybe joy and that ends in an uncertain and messy place.
• Your story matters.
• We want to know your story. 
• We want to help you find the stories you’ve been yearning for.

Dear Problem Patients: An open letter to anyone who’s ever felt dismissed by their doctor – No End In Sight

Over this summer both of us read Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, Orwell’s Roses,1 which she was inspired to write when she discovered that George Orwell had not only written the bleakest and most powerful portrayals of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century,2 but had also planted rose bushes, costing him sixpence each from Woolworths. This apparent contradiction between the bleak worldview and the hopeful act of gardening, reminded Solnit of the political slogan “Bread and Roses” which seems to have emerged in the US around 1910 and was used by women campaigning for votes for women and for workers’ rights. Describing the power of the slogan, Solnit wrote:

“Bread fed the body, roses fed something subtler: not just hearts, but imaginations, psyches, senses, identities. It was a pretty slogan but a fierce argument that more than survival and bodily well-being were needed and were being demanded as a right. It was equally an argument against the idea that everything that human beings need can be reduced to quantifiable, tangible goods and conditions. Roses in these declarations stood for the way that human beings are complex, desires are irreducible, that what sustains us is often subtle and elusive.”

“Bread and roses” are what the humans involved in care—the patient and the clinician—want from healthcare. Bread is sustenance and therefore life; roses are courage and hope, curiosity and joy, and all that makes a life worth living. Bread is biology; roses are biography. Bread is transactional and technocratic; roses are relational. Bread is science; roses are care, kindness and love.

“Bread and roses” can also describe how healthcare can support care. With apologies to those who bake their own loaves, the parallel here is with the industrial production of bread, so that bread represents the bureaucratic processes that make healthcare efficient and safe, preventing waste and error through standardisation, regulation, and training. Baking bread is like the technologies and innovations that make unhurried conversations and continuity of care possible and feasible, that reduce diagnostic errors, and detect and correct harms early and reliably. Attending to the bread makes sure healthcare retains the potential to attend to the object of care, to the bodies and minds, the fears and feelings of individual patients, and to create the conditions for careful and kind care to emerge.

Roses represent what makes life worth living, all that is good in human relationships, and the stories we use to make sense of our desperate situations and of what is possible with treatment. Roses are what gives us comfort in the face of failure, pain, decay, and death, that is, in the face of living. Attending to roses brings the subject of care into sharp relief so that the scars of injustice, racism, inequity, and violence can be made visible alongside the scars of disease. Roses, like careful and kind care,3 speak of hope—our work of planting and creating conditions of light, soil, and water makes it possible that a flower will appear in the future. Just like roses, care cannot be summoned or coaxed, but must emerge from the right conditions.

Responding to the crisis of care | The BMJ

How to respond to this crisis of care?

Here, Orwell himself holds the clue. The discovery that Orwell had planted those roses led Solnit to reassess his novel 1984. Within all the greyness and cruelty and oppression, there is this great truth:

“What mattered were individual relationships, and that a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself.”2

All the joy, all the roses of health, even in these dire times, exist within relationships, between patients and professionals, and between healthcare colleagues; and in the sure knowledge that all these helpless gestures have value in themselves.

It turns out that the subversive, almost revolutionary thing to do within contemporary healthcare is to build, quietly and unobtrusively, these crucial relationships. We now know that continuity of care, within a unique dyad of patient and doctor, delays disease and prolongs lives5 and thereby supplies bread, but it does so by simultaneously giving us the roses of joy, trust, curiosity, care, kindness, and solidarity. A life worth living tends to last longer.

In fact, care, like love, is abundant and self-sustaining, a potential of everyone. Trained and celebrated, caring is a demanding human capability that swells with the satisfaction of having opted to run towards the pain, that replenishes with the smile and the gratitude with which we evaluate our effectiveness, that regenerates when the care, and love, returns to care givers when they, invariably, must become care receivers. Care, like roses, gives meaning to living. We must cultivate care.

In fighting our way out of this healthcare crisis, in working for careful and kind care for all, we must follow the suffragettes and demand “bread and roses.”

Responding to the crisis of care | The BMJ

Don't wanna be free of hope
And I'm at the end of my rope
It's so tough just to be alive
When I feel like the living dead

I'm givin' it up so plain
I'm livin' my life in vain
And where am I going to?
I gotta really try
Try so hard to get by
And where am I going to?

Flip on your TV
And try to make sense out of that
If we were all in the movies
Maybe we wouldn't be so bored

We're givin' it up so plain
We're livin' our lives in vain
And where are we going to?
We gotta really try
Try so hard to get by
And where are we going to?

Life in Vain by Daniel Johnston

I call it burning these days because that’s what it feels like: like there’s an idea inside me burning its way out. But when I was younger, I called it flying. What I really meant was controlled falling. Like there was a tornado going on and I would leap off something and ride right through the middle of it, all the way up, chasing words. Because that’s what it felt like for me, rolling on through the manic energy that comes with being bipolar.

A lot of folks equate the manic energy of being bipolar with the creative spark that drives artists to brilliance. They point to so many great artists in history who lived with mental illness and say, “There it is, that energy, that’s what made them great!”

Except for so many artists, mental illness didn’t make them great. It made them ill. And if they weren’t careful, it made them gone.

DISABILITY VISIBILITY: FIRST PERSON STORIES FROM THE 21ST CENTURY

Do you know why we have the sunflowers?

She talked about Vincent van Gogh, the artist who suffered during his life from mental illness, self-medicated, was treated by doctors, and struggled to succeed despite his obvious impossible talent due to his sickness. She talked about her knowledge of his life, thanks to her art history degree, and how he sold only one painting his entire life—not because he wasn’t recognized by his community as a genius but because he struggled to even be part of a community due to his illness.

And I thought of the flying and the hard days at the word mines. I thought about the days when I heard the tornado in my head and couldn’t make the words get to my fingers. I thought about the frustration, the depression, the difficulties talking to people about what it sounded like inside my skull some days when I could barely pay attention because of the rush of words and ideas.

Hannah Gadsby told people artists don’t have to suffer for their art, and I’ll forever thank her for having the guts to stand up and say that to the world. Because I used to believe it was true.

DISABILITY VISIBILITY: FIRST PERSON STORIES FROM THE 21ST CENTURY

Being bipolar is a constant system of checks and balances. These days I fight against needing my medication adjusted a lot, against depression and anxiety, mania and hypomania. I still end up flying some days, sometimes for days at a time, because as time goes on, the body changes and you have to adjust to new needs, new doses, new medication.

Coping mechanisms change, life situations go ways you never expected, mania and depression rear their ugly heads. But the day I went on medication was one of the greatest days of my life, because it was the day my creative spark stopped becoming an excuse to keep putting up with an illness that was killing me.

DISABILITY VISIBILITY: FIRST PERSON STORIES FROM THE 21ST CENTURY

Remember to 
breathe, Love. 
For you are alive.

--Breathe, You are Alive! by Gaelynn Lea

Flowerpunk is the new umbrella name for the webcomic universe I am creating. Previously known as “The Increasingly Absurd Endeavours of Gretchen Goosander,” Flowerpunk now no longer has a main character, instead it follows multiple characters across multiple stories. This story is a dark fantasy that takes place in a world very much like our own, only there are some intruding magical elements. Magic used to be much more abundant, but it is now starting to disappear as Capitalism lays waste to the world and has commodified what is left of the magic elements.

The first story begins in the city of Wyrdon, where a supernatural plague known as “the rot” is slowly decaying everything it comes into contact with. It is up to a group of anarchists to try and help as many people as possible through acts of radical compassion before more citizens are turned into maggots. Along the way, our main characters, Ludwig and Kimi, come to realise that in order to save everyone, they must bring back the magic.

Flowerpunk | Kaya’s Kosmos

“Anarchy isn’t about chaos. It’s about love”

In the city of Wyrdon, a supernatural plague known as “the rot” ravages the streets, slowly rotting the city to its core and turning the residents into maggots. A small group living outside of society known as “The Lovely Anarchists” are working tirelessly to save the city’s soul by bringing back the magic needed to stave of the rot. This is no easy task since the world’s magic has been hoarded by the ultra-wealthy.

Flowerpunk is a 10-chapter miniseries following two anarchists in particular. Ludwig, a hard-ass punk and Kimi, a candycore soft boy.

Over time, the two find a sense of mutual healing in each other and the perfect antidote to their shared feeling of powerlessness in a cruel and twisted world.

Expect anarchist hijinks, weird magical plant-powered machinery, messed-up nightmarish monsters and tons of queer goodness!

Read Flowerpunk | Tapas Web Comics, Flowerpunk | WEBTOON

In the Parable books Lauren is a young, black, disabled woman who manages to not merely survive but to create a belief system and lead a community that brings together and helps thousands in the midst of chaos. As a result, this series is one example of how a better future can include those of us whose lives, bodyminds, and perspectives are often devalued and discounted.

Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction

Earthseed is Olamina’s contribution to what she feels should be a species-wide effort to evade, or at least to lengthen the specialize-grow-die evolutionary cycle that humanity faces, that every species faces.

Parable of the Sower (Parable, 1)

A time has come to again look at changes in the way technology allows us to see the world and experience it. First was the human eye, with a lens made of flesh. Later humans developed a replacement for the eye but in the form and fashion of the lens of the eye; this time it was made of glass doped with metals to enhance its control of light. To see, the human eye has a retina filled with responsive cells which look for contrast and color.

Technology has allowed us to create a replacement for the retina called a CCD with metals which respond to color and report those values to a microchip which converts them to bits and bytes for storage. I will present to you the same extension of sight by explaining how the images you will see come into existence.

In my artwork the landscape is created via the execution of a seed of a formula, allowed to grow and flourish in a mathematical set of steps. In a similar way, crystals grow underground in a cave over many millennia but they follow a seed of a universal pattern related to their atomic structure and facilitated by the chemical nature of their environments. In our regular world, we have 3 directions we can move, forward-back, up-down and left-right, but these crystals can move in another set of directions allowed by the universe and mathematics. They are, and must be considered elements of nature, and it follows that the methods used to convey them must be considered legitimate tools of expression.

A crystal starts at a virtual geometric position, a virtual center, then it mathematically and procedurally grows outward and inward according to a seed formula. However it exists in a dark world devoid of light and color; it is only a cloud of form. As an artist, I create an eye with a lens which follows the same mathematical processes as the lens of a camera and the eye itself. I situate the virtual eye to be gazing upon the crystal as I create sources of light which will illuminate the crystal and reflect light back to the lens.

As an artist I imbue color to the crystal, I imbue reflectivity, I imbue refractability, and I imbue density or transparency exactly towards the same purpose as a painter would do, in combining pigmented oils on canvas with a brush in his or her hand.

My artwork is digital photography in a world where objects exist in more than 3 dimensions, and where no known means of physical representation has yet been discovered to exist.

Adriel Jeremiah Wool

Emergent strategy is a way that all of us can begin to see the world in life-code—awakening us to the sacred systems of life all around us. Many of us have been and are becoming students of these systems of life, wondering if in fact we can unlock some crucial understanding about our own humanity if we pay closer attention to this place we are from, the bodies we are in.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

But emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies. Emergence is our inheritance as a part of this universe; it is how we change. Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

What is Emergent Strategy? “Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions”—I will repeat these words from Nick Obolenksy throughout this book because they are the clearest articulation of emergence that I have come across. In the framework of emergence, the whole is a mirror of the parts. Existence is fractal—the health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

Octavia wrote novels with young Black women protagonists meeting aliens, surviving apocalypse, evolving into vampires, becoming telepathic networks, time traveling to reckon with slave-owning ancestors. Woven throughout her work are two things: 1) a coherent visionary exploration of humanity and 2) emergent strategies for being better humans.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

I was looking for language and frameworks to use when exploring the kind of leadership Butler’s protagonists practiced, and found them in conversations with ill and Grace about emergence—interdependence, iteration, being in relationship with constantly changing conditions, fractals.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

fractals: the relationship between small and large

A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

Octavia was concerned with scale—understanding that what happens at the interpersonal level is a way to understand the whole of society. In many of her books, she shows us how radical ideas spread through conversation, questions, one to one interactions. Social movements right now are also fractal, practicing at a small scale what we most want to see at the universal level. No more growth or scaling up before actually learning through experience.

Rather than narrowing into one path forward, Octavia’s leaders were creating more and more possibilities. Not one perfect path forward, but an abundance of futures, of ways to manage resources together, to be brilliant together.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

Fractals are one form of redundancy that has attracted particular attention from scientists. A fractal pattern is one in which the same motif is repeated at differing scales. Picture the frond of a fern, for example: each segment, from the largest at the base of the plant to the tiniest at its tip, is essentially the same shape. Such “self-similar” organization is found not only in plants but also in clouds and flames, sand dunes and mountain ranges, ocean waves and rock formations, the contours of coastlines and the gaps in tree canopies. All these phenomena are structured as forms built of smaller forms built of still smaller forms, an order underlying nature’s apparently casual disarray.

Fractal patterns are much more common in nature than in man-made environments. Moreover, nature’s fractals are of a distinctive kind. Mathematicians rank fractal patterns according to their complexity on a scale from 0 to 3; fractals found in nature tend to fall in a middle range, with a value of between 1.3 and 1.5. Research shows that, when presented with computer-generated fractal patterns, people prefer mid-range fractals to those that are more or less complex. Studies have also demonstrated that looking at these patterns has a soothing effect on the human nervous system; measures of skin conductance reveal a dip in physiological arousal when subjects are shown mid-range fractals. Likewise, people whose brain activity is being recorded with EEG equipment enter a state that researchers call “wakefully relaxed”—simultaneously alert and at ease—when viewing fractals like those found in nature.

There is even evidence that our ability to think clearly and solve problems is enhanced by encounters with these nature-like fractals.

The Extended Mind – Annie Murphy Paul

Friendly reminder that neurodivergent is an umbrella term that is inclusive and not exclusive – this means mental illnesses are considered neurodivergent.
⁣
A few things: ⁣
⁣
Neurodivergent is an umbrella term for anyone who has a mind or brain that diverges from what is seen as typical or normal. ⁣
⁣
Neurodivergent is a term created by Kassiane Asasumasu, a biracial, multiply neurodivergent activist. Neurodiversity is a different term created by Judy Singer, an autistic sociologist.⁣
⁣
Neurodivergent doesn’t just refer to neurological conditions, this is an inaccurate idea based on the prefix of neuro.⁣
⁣
Identifying as neurodivergent is up to the individual and we don’t gatekeep or enforce the term.

Sonny Jane Wise (@livedexperienceeducator)

Non-exhaustive list

Requiring diagnosis was counter to trans liberation and acceptance. The exact same is true of Autism.

Dr. Devon Price

Self diagnosis is not just “valid” — it is liberatory. When we define our community ourselves and wrest our right to self-definition back from the systems that painted us as abnormal and sick, we are powerful, and free.

Dr. Devon Price

• Embracing pluralism is good citizenship. Democracy demands equal accommodation.
• Fostering healthy pluralism, which democracy demands, means confronting intolerance.
• Pluralism is our reality.

Abled culture teaches you to act as if you are independent, to buy into the myth of independence. Reject this. Embrace interdependence and know it is the only way we will be able to end this pandemic. Know that if we center disabled people, first and foremost those who are high risk, it will help everyone. 

You Are Not Entitled To Our Deaths: COVID, Abled Supremacy & Interdependence 

This work is about shifting how we understand access, moving away from the individualized and independence-framed notions of access put forth by the disability rights movement and, instead, working to view access as collective and interdependent.

With disability justice, we want to move away from the“myth of independence,” that everyone can and should be able to do everything on their own. I am not fighting for independence, as much of the disability rights movement rallies behind. I am fighting for an interdependence that embraces need and tells the truth: no one does it on their own and the myth of independence is just that, a myth.

Changing the Framework: Disability Justice | Leaving Evidence

It is from being disabled that I heave learned about the dangerous and privileged “myth of independence” and embraced the power of interdependence. The myth of independence being of course, that somehow we can and should be able to do everything on our own without any help from anyone.  This requires such a high level of privilege and even then, it is still a myth.  Whose oppression and exploitation must exist for your “independence?”

We believe and swallow ableist notions that people should be “independent,” that we would never want to have to have a nurse, or not be able to drive, or not be able to see, or hear.  We believe that we should be able to do things on our own and push our selves (and the law) hard to ensure that we can.   We believe ableist heteronormative ideas that families should function as independent little spheres.  That I should just focus on MY family and make sure MY family is fed, clothed and provided for; that MY family inherits MY wealth; that families should not be dependent on the state or anyone else; that they should be “able-bodied,” essentially. We believe the ableist heteronormative racist classist myth that marriage, “independence” as sanctified through the state, is what we want because it allows us to be more “independent,” more “equal” to those who operate as if they are independent—That somehow, this makes us more “able.”

And to be clear, I do not desire independence, as much of the disability rights movement rallies behind.  I am not fighting for independence.   I desire community and movements that are collectively interdependent.

As a disabled person, I am dependant on other people in order to survive in this ableist society;  I am interdependent in order to shift and queer ableism into something that can be kneaded, molded and added to the many tools we will need to transform the world.  Being physically disabled and having mobility needs that are considered “special,” means that I often need people to help me carry things, push my wheelchair, park my car, or lend me an arm to lean on when I walk.   It means that much of my accessibility depends on the person I’m with and the relationship I have with them. Because most accessibility is done through relationships, many disabled people must learn the keen art of maintaining a relationship in order to maintain their level of accessibility.  It is an exhausting task and something that we have had to master and execute seamlessly, in many of the same ways we have all had to master how to navigate and survive white supremacy, heterosexism, our families, economic exploitation, violence and trauma.   This is also one of the main conditions which allow for disabled people to be victims of violence and sexual assault.

Interdependence (exerpts from several talks) | Leaving Evidence

Self-care is birthed by and through community care.

Talila A. Lewis

What is mutual aid?

“Solidarity, not charity.”

Why is a spoon share helpful?

• Interdependence, understanding and support
• Gives opportunity to help & care for other in on our own terms and within our own capacities
• Direct support in a community within a community
• It’s much easier to practice asking, offering, receiving, and declining among people who “get it”!

Collective Community Care: Dreaming of Futures in Autistic Mutual Aid

Increasingly, autistic communities have been exposed to ideas of disability justice, interdependence, access intimacy, collective/community care, and mutual aid. Care collectives, spoon shares, and other community care groups by and for disabled people, racialized people, LGBTQ2IA+ people (and people at this intersection) are growing in number. Is there a future for autistic spaces to also act as spaces of intentional mutual aid?

Moving from a rights-based perspective to a justice-based one necessitates a look at our care systems and re-envisioning how our communities function to ensure no one is left behind.

Collective Community Care: Dreaming of Futures in Autistic Mutual Aid, Autscape: 2020 Presentations

Interdependence, real interdependence can be the difference between making the best of a bad situation and spiraling into isolation, burnout and or mental illness. As such, the advice I tend to give new and prospective grad students is focus on building relationships, seek relationships, invest in relationships, lean on your relationships, because no matter how much you think you can just will yourself into focusing on your work, at some point the work is going to suck. Or maybe it won’t. I don’t know. Are you willing to bet your mental wellness?

Remember it’s interdependence, not just dependance. If you have the time and energy, see if you can pay it forward. It’s definitely a lot of work, but it can be a really rewarding to see yourself actually contribute to another person’s wellbeing. Try it sometime!

How to Survive Grad School (and Other Toxic Jobs) – YouTube

Multiple participants discussed how self-determination co-existed with meaningful relationships and partnerships, including family and parenting responsibilities. Although Kyle affirmed the value of freedom in making choices and decisions, he also acknowledged that interdependence is important because “having a group to lift you up or care for you is important for health and wellness.” 

Frontiers | Toward understanding and enhancing self-determination: a qualitative exploration with autistic adults without co-occurring intellectual disability

Access intimacy is one of the main ways that I have been building interdependence in my life. I have been pushing myself to grow it and not just subsist on the little I have been able to find, most significantly with my partner, as is the case for many disabled folks. Engaging in building any kind of interdependence will always be a risk, for everyone involved; and the risk will always be greater for those who are more oppressed and have less access to privilege. In an ableist world where disabled people are understood as disposable, it can be especially hard to build interdependence with people you need in order to survive, but who don’t need you in order to survive. In an ableist context, interdependence will always get framed as “burden,” and disability will always get framed as “inferior.” To actively work to build something that is thought of as undeniably undesirable and to try and reframe it to others as liberatory, is no small task.

Especially as disabled people, we know what it means to live interdependent lives and it does not always feel revolutionary or enjoyable.

Access intimacy is interdependence in action. It is an acknowledgement that what is most important is not whether or not things are perfectly accessible, or whether or not there is ableism; but rather what the impact of inaccessibility and ableism is on disabled people and our lives. In my experience, when access intimacy is present, the most powerful part is having someone to navigate access and ableism with. It is knowing that someone else is with me in this mess. It is knowing that someone else is willing to be with me in the never-ending and ever-changing daily obstacle course that is navigating an inaccessible world. It is knowing that I will not be alone in the stunning silence, avoidance and denial of ableism by almost every able bodied person I have ever and will ever come in contact with. Access intimacy is knowing that I will not be alone in the stealth, insidious poison that is ableism.

The power of access intimacy is that it reorients our approach from one where disabled people are expected to squeeze into able bodied people’s world, and instead calls upon able bodied people to inhabit our world.

In my life, access intimacy continues to be a game-changer, a way to queer access into a tool we can use to get free. It has been a way to shift and queer how I and others understand disability and ableism. And because of the inherent interdependence of access intimacy—the “we” of access intimacy—it has transformed the kinds of conversations I am able to have with some of the able bodied people in my life. 

Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice | Leaving Evidence

Mia Mingus in Hamraie and Fritsch (2019) describe access intimacy as a “crip relational practice produced when interdependence informs the making of access” (p.14). As such, interdependent ways of languaging, like augmented speech, do not appeal to many abled people. For example, as Mackay’s (2003) work with aphasia patients showed, the patients were viewed as incompetent because of their voicelessness. Given an acceptance of interdependence and care work in languaging via crip time, the patients would be viewed as competent (Rossetti et al., 2008).

Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: A Crip Linguistics Manifesto | Journal of Critical Study of Communication and Disability

Hamraie (2013) asks us to think about the politics of access through the framework of interdependence. Languaging, as an important site of access—to the world, to politics, to belonging, to citizenship—thus demands that we think about this through the lens of collective access and care. Rejecting monolingualism and mono-modality are two beginning steps. Embracing time, space, and material environments in meaning-making are also preliminary steps. Interdependence also asks us to think about our built environments and how that impacts access (Hamraie, 2013), and in our case, language. Hamraie (2017) also instigates us to consider how discrimination is built into the structures around us, the buildings, the foundations, the frameworks, and theories, and so on. When in the process of crippling linguistics, we question how modality chauvinism has been built into the various language focused fields and the perspectives of what language is and what is good languaging. Hamraie and Fritsch’s (2019) practices of “interdependence, access intimacy, and collective access can be understood as alternative political technologies through Crip technoscience” (p.13). Crip technoscience is “critique, alteration, and reinvention” (p.2). It is how disabled people alter and reinvent the world in order to make access happen. The relationship between science, technology, and language is such that the dismissal of disabled ways of languaging has resulted in inaccessible technologies.

Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: A Crip Linguistics Manifesto | Journal of Critical Study of Communication and Disability

One lesson from crip languaging is the idea of interdependence and forms of access intimacy through the discourse process.

View of Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: A Crip Linguistics Manifesto

These and other material practices describe a crip technoscientific sensibility wherein disabled interdependence also enables what Mingus (2017) calls “access intimacy,” a crip relational practice produced when interdependence informs the making of access.

Crip Technoscience Manifesto

If, as Kafer argues, disabled people have often uneasy or “ambivalent relationships to technology” (2013, p. 119), our practices of interdependence, access intimacy, and collective access can be understood as alternative political technologies: “disabled people,” she writes, “are not cyborgs…because of our bodies (e.g., our use of prosthetics, ventilators, or attendants), but because of our political practices” (p. 120). Crip technoscience offers interdependence as a central analytic for disability–technology relations, recognizing that in disability culture, community, and knower-maker practices, interdependence acts as a political technology for materializing better worlds.

Crip Technoscience Manifesto

…the eco-system arises from and responds to the multiple ways in which everyone is causally interconnected with, interdependent with, and fundamentally the same as all other humans, and literary representations of these various types of solidarity, their inherence in human nature, and their benefits to people who recognize and embrace them can help students incorporate these principles into their mental models of human nature and thus both recognize and enact them more productively in their personal, professional, and civic lives.

The most obviously systemic form of interconnectedness is existential: we all depend on other humans for our very existence and survival—that is, for the production and distribution of our food, clothing, and shelter, not to mention the complex technologies that we in the postindustrial world have come to rely on. We are dependent on the work of countless other individuals at every moment in our lives, and we simply could not exist without their direct and indirect contributions to our lives.

Literature, Social Wisdom, and Global Justice: Developing Systems Thinking

The philosophers Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher lay out five key elements of care…virtues to be developed if you wanted to APPLY an ethics of care to things in your life. Think of this as a sort of HOW TO manual for moral maturity UNDER an ethics of care. These virtues IN ORDER are:

• Attentiveness
• Responsibility
• Competence
• Responsiveness
• Plurality

Episode #168 – Introduction to an Ethics of Care — Philosophize This!
Episode #168 -Transcript — Philosophize This!

• Care work makes all other work possible.
• Putting care—not just care work, but care—at the center of our economy, our politics, is to orient ourselves around our interdependence.
• Care is an organizational structure needed to keep our nation running. It’s, by definition, infrastructure.
• Health is at the center of the human experience.
• We need a counterculture of care.
• I feel that that the fundamental property of humanness is to fill those spaces where humanity has been abandoned with love. Those who would change the system have to begin with love, and with the vision to build geographies of care built from that love.
• Reframing is self-care and social change.
• Those who are the most sensitive and traumatised and have not lost the ability to extend trust constitute an enormously rich and diverse repository of insights and hold many of the keys needed for co-creating ecologies of care.
• Create more anti-ableist spaces. Let’s act to hold ALL spaces accountable for providing care and access to disabled folks with all types of bodies and minds.
• We can start building more accessible, care-centered communities now. We can combat ableism now. We can lay the groundwork for a world that works better for all of us.

Care is not charity or kindness. Care is the deeply fraught, complex, abolitionist, political work of protecting one another and the planet, meeting everyone’s needs in balance with the collective good, and keeping our communities safe without the use of policing.

Freedom requires care because freedom is not just a right—it is also a responsibility. Freedom means getting to be our whole selves, in community with other whole selves, without any threat to or assault on our well-being. Freedom means an experience of daily life in which each of us is fully seen and affirmed, treated with unconditional dignity and care, and embraced as an invaluable person of immeasurable worth. Freedom, then, sets an incredibly high standard for community life. It requires that every member of the collective work toward the goals of protection, safety, and unconditional care for all people and for the natural world.

Are We Teaching Care or Control?

The activities that constitute care are crucial for human life. We defined care in this way: Care is “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Fisher and Tronto, 1990, p. 40).

Several aspects of this definition of care are noteworthy: First, we describe care as a “species activity,” a philosophical term we use because it suggests that how people care for one another is one of the features that make people human. Second, we describe care as an action, as a practice, not as a set of principles or rules. Third, our notion of care contains a standard, but a flexible one: We care so that we can live in the world as well as possible. The understanding of what will be good care depends upon the way of life, the set of values and conditions, of the people engaged in the caring practice.

Furthermore, caring is a process that can occur in a variety of institutions and settings.

Care is found in the household, in services and goods sold in the market, in the workings of bureaucratic organizations in contemporary life. Care is not restricted to the traditional realm of mother’s work, to welfare agencies, or to hired domestic servants but is found in all of these realms. Indeed, concerns about care permeate our daily lives, the institutions in the modern marketplace, the corridors of government. Because we tend to follow the traditional division of the world into public and private spheres and to think of caring as an aspect of private life, care is usually associated with activities of the household. As a result, caring is greatly undervalued in our culture- in the assumption that caring is somehow “women’s work,” in perceptions of caring occupations, in the wages and salaries paid to workers engaged in provision of care, in the assumption that care is menial. One of the central tasks for people interested in care is to change the overall public value associated with care. When our public values and priorities reflect the role that care actually plays in our lives, our world will be organized quite differently.

An Ethic of Care on JSTOR

Let's organize our lives around love and care
Let's write each other letters and call it prayer
Let's congregate in the place that isn't anywhere
At the temple of broken dreams