Theme
The organizers who tied disability rights to racial justice, and refused to separate them.
Journal entries
Sep 2, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 28–29
The people building the most useful support systems for Black autistic children and their families are not in the journals I was searching first.
Aug 29, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slide 18
A layer of shared knowledge, community, and communication that changed who could be heard — and who stopped being alone.
Aug 27, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 14–16
Three civil rights leaders who lived the intersection of race, disability, class, and gender — and one quote I have carried my whole life without knowing whose it was.
Aug 26, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 13 & 23
The history of neurodiversity is not one line. There is a parallel pathway bubbling up underneath it — intersectionality — and I cannot tell the first story honestly without it.
Aug 26, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, racial justice and intersectionality
Brad Lomax, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Donald Galloway did not treat disability rights and racial justice as adjacent causes. My own coursework had.
Aug 25, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, the shift that reorganized my thinking
My fledgling EdD (lowercase edd) thought: neurodivergent rights have evolved — but neurodivergent justice has transformed. Transformation has to be the goal.
Aug 25, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, advocates
Jim Sinclair's 1993 essay reframed a sentence parents said constantly, and I have not been able to unhear it.
Aug 24, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, key figures and pioneers
Itard believed empathy and language separated men from beasts. Ninety years later the Supreme Court decided Carrie Buck's rights did not matter. The same logic runs through both.
Research ideas
emerging
A convergence rather than a single theory: disability activism, disability studies, the social model of disability, critical theory, poststructuralism, and intersectional feminism.
Reading & influences
Podcast · Maria Davis-Pierre
Education, advocacy training, and support for Black parents and families of autistic individuals. The expertise I most needed was not in the databases I searched first — it was in community-led work like this.
Person · Cheryl Poe
Grassroots advocacy training for Black families navigating school systems. Her work shows what support looks like when it is built by the community that needs it rather than delivered to them.
Talk · Fannie Lou Hamer
I have heard this line my whole life without knowing whose it was. Knowing she said it while living at the intersection of race, gender, poverty, and disability — including a forced hysterectomy — changes what the sentence weighs.
Article · Jim Sinclair, Autism Network International
The sentence that reorganized the presentation: wishing a child did not have autism is wishing for a different child. Not an appendage. I have stopped using "child with autism" as if the noun were detachable.
Website · Sins Invalid
The movement that grew out of — and past — the disability rights framework I presented in Week 6. Its insistence on intersectionality, leadership of the most impacted, and anti-capitalist critique of "productivity" keeps surfacing in my thinking about who schools are built to reward. This is where disability rights stops being a checklist and becomes a lens.
Video · Cheryl Poe & Maria Davis-Pierre
Two Black advocates naming what the mainstream neurodiversity conversation leaves out: that Black families fight a different battle for diagnosis, services, and belief. It grounds the "missing voices" slide from my presentation — the internet built community for many neurodivergent people, but access to that community, and to being heard in it, was never evenly distributed.
Article · Stanford Neurodiversity Project
The advocacy arm of the Stanford work — moving neurodiversity from a research topic into institutional practice: hiring, teaching, and campus culture. A model of what it looks like when a university treats neurodivergent people as a community to include rather than a problem to remediate.