Autistic Community & the Neurodiversity Movement

For this week's readings, we read chapters 5 and 7 of Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories from the Frontline. In chapter 5, Tisoncik discusses the creation of her website, autistics.org, and how the community found their voices as an activist movement. The website was intended to be a collection of support and services for autistic adults, as opposed to merely offering resources for parents of autistic children, like #autism provided. In chapter 7, Neurodiversity.com: A Decade of Advocacy, Seidel talks about how she created Neurodiversity Weblog, which later came to be Neurodiversity.com. She states that the neurodiversity movement consists of "disabled individuals, their family members, and [other] allies constructively responding to prejudice, stigma and pejorative labeling." Different people have different ways of thinking, and not just those with diagnoses may appreciate this simple truth.

In the class discussion about these chapters, we mentioned the important role that the technology of the time played in the foundation and success of these websites. Some examples included mailing lists, discussion forums, IRC channels, feed aggregators, Yahoo groups, Listservs, and Usenet. It is because of these features that the movement as a whole was able to move forward and really gain the pace to become what it is today.

I was lucky enough again to be provided with more information about the history of the autism rights movement. The Internet has been immensely helpful for autism activism and currently still is today, of course, as we see the rise in community hashtag and lots discourse involving media campaigns of various groups. As I learned whilst working on my history resource project, quite a fair portion of the autism rights movement's work has taken place online and will likely continue to do so, especially given how the pandemic showed the various ways in which technology can help connect people.