Theme
Discrimination arrives in layers, and the layers do not operate independently.
Journal entries
Oct 20, 2026 · Dissertation · Research direction
I have a name for what I want the dissertation to leave behind: a blueprint of belonging — a buildable plan for how a predominantly white private school welcomes, supports, scaffolds, and retains its BIPOC and marginalized students, including neurodivergent students and students pushed outside the bubble of normalcy for gender identity or any other reason.
Oct 7, 2026 · Dissertation · Research direction
My working title was too chunky and too broad, and my professor said so. Her suggestion narrows it to the crossroads I actually care about: BIPOC students at the intersection of neurodiversity, in my particular school, and how their sense of belonging influences achievement.
Oct 5, 2026 · Writing practice with students · Unmasking AI
I often feel like my own bubble of energy, close to a social group but just outside its rhythm. This reflection asks what repeated moments of misfit teach me about belonging without confusing my experience with racism.
Sep 24, 2026 · Reading · A Better Way to Teach the Civil Rights Movement
I grew up on a civil rights movement with one leader and a lady on a bus. Anderson and Morris are teaching me what my textbooks left out — Rosa Parks' training, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bayard Rustin — and what that omission trained me to believe about whose stories get kept.
Sep 10, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Recorded presentation · Draft 1
A recorded walk-through of the history of neurodiversity. This is a first draft, not a finished piece — I am posting it so the revisions have something to revise.
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.
Sep 1, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 24–25
How do we take all of these layers and move toward more equity for neurodiverse students in schools? Start with who gets identified — and who gets sent to me.
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.
Milestones
Open questions
Research ideas
developing
The constructive goal of the dissertation: a study-derived, buildable plan for how a predominantly white private school welcomes, supports, scaffolds, and retains its BIPOC and marginalized populations — including neurodivergent students and students marginalized for gender identity or any other way they are placed outside the bubble of normalcy.
developing
The direction my professor gave me when my first title proved too broad: study BIPOC students at the intersection of neurodiversity and the other crossroads that meet at my particular school — how that intersection relates to their sense of belonging, and how belonging influences achievement.
emerging
A convergence rather than a single theory: disability activism, disability studies, the social model of disability, critical theory, poststructuralism, and intersectional feminism.
Projects
EDOC 7120 · Global Histories and Politics in Education · Fall 2026 · Week 6
A co-presentation with Diana Gaukel tracing neurodiversity from 18th-century institutionalization through Buck v. Bell, IDEA, and the self-advocacy movement, into decolonizing critiques and present-day school practice — closing with positionality and a norms exercise for the room.
Reading & influences
Book · Joy Buolamwini
Buolamwini's account keeps my reflection on belonging accountable to power. Feeling socially outside is real, but it is not interchangeable with racialized and gendered exclusion. Her work asks who technology recognizes, whose intelligence receives legitimacy, and who bears the cost when systems reproduce an unequal gaze.
Book · bell hooks
Hooks names the move from silence into speech as an act of resistance — "talking back" to authority as daring to have an opinion. I read this as the scholarly version of my own story: I found my voice after fifty, and it still costs something every time I use it. Essential for the voice-and-silence thread.
Article · Dorothy E. Roberts
Complicates my thread in a useful way: silence is not only submission — it can be chosen, strategic, protective, a form of resistance. If I study silence in my students, I have to be careful not to read every quiet student as voiceless. Some are holding their voice on purpose.
Article · Kimberlé Crenshaw
Gave me the language and the picture for something my students live: discrimination arrives on several roads at once. Once I had the diagram I could not un-see it in placement decisions.
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.
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.
Talk · Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw
Multiple points of discrimination that intersect and do not operate independently. It moved from something I cited to something that constrains how I would sample and whom I would ask.
Podcast · Maria Davis-Pierre, LMHC; Cheryl Poe, M.A. Urban Ed.
Where I go to correct the whiteness of my reading list. Advocacy and clinical practice in the same voice, aimed at families the research literature keeps under-describing.
Book · Monique W. Morris
Corrects my default image of the punished student. Black girls are disciplined for being loud, unladylike, or insufficiently deferential — a standard that is racial and gendered at once. Reading this next to Crenshaw is what convinced me racialized rigor cannot be studied without intersectionality doing real analytic work.
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 · Francis Boateng
Pushes on my intersectionality thread: Blackness is not one experience, and immigrant students negotiate identities schools rarely see. If I ask 'who is being held to the white standard,' I also have to ask which Blackness the standard is measuring.
Dissertation · S. Danielle Harley
A dissertation about exactly the world I work in: Black girls at a predominantly white independent school, and what the unwritten 'assignment' of surviving it costs them. This is both a model for my methodology and evidence that my questions are not hypothetical.
Article · Shirley Mthethwa-Sommers & Obed Kisiara
Documents how school culture itself — the rituals, the expectations, the unspoken rules — lands on African immigrant students. Reminds me that 'school culture' is the thing I am actually studying, and that it is legible to the people it excludes.