Week 7 Blog Post

The reading for this week gives a background for activist movements and the author, Laura Tisoncik’s own experience with activism prior to her role in the autism movement. She describes the Civil Rights movement and the injustice African American people faced during the rise of this movement. While this movement is separate from the autism movement, it provides a history for activism and a basis for which potential creators of movement can build upon. This exemplifies the importance of history to activism and how it is necessary to understand history to create and advocate for a given cause. Tisoncik also goes into detail about her personal experiences with activism and how that eventually led to her work in the neurodiversity movement. For instance, activist groups that she personally identified with were a medium through which she could communicate with other people and provided her a genre in which she could identify with and thus communicate to the general public because she had a message and a cause. It is notable that activism is used here as a genre of communication in substitution of her own speech. Activism is used as a tool for communication. Tisoncik describes a personal switch in which she uses activism as an ethical tool as opposed to communicative: “Activism was no longer a crutch but an ethical commitment, to right what was wrong and to side with the weak against the predators of the strong” (68). This switch provides a foundation for her creation of her website and progress made in the autism movement. Therefore, the role that the historical background plays in activism is apparent.