Theme
How to study something that refuses to sit still for a survey.
Journal entries
Sep 3, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 31–32
Where I stand shapes what I can see. And I would like us to retire the word neurotypical.
Aug 27, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, global impact
Before InLv and Autistics.org, many neurodivergent people lived in deep isolation and the true population ratio was simply unknown.
Aug 25, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, postwar psychology
After WWII the cause of autism shifted from biological to psychological — and landed squarely on mothers. Rimland pushed back. But the voices I found first were all white, male, and old.
Jan 24, 2026 · Research Design
I kept reaching for a survey, then stopped. A number can tell me a student feels safe on Tuesday. It cannot tell me why they stopped raising their hand by November.
Milestones
Open questions
live
live
live
resolving
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.
exploring
A possible dissertation site: passing periods as the least-designed, most-revealing part of the school day.
established
Positionality work on insider research: what I can see that an outsider cannot, and what I will never be able to see at all.
Projects
Research Design · Winter 2026
A design memo arguing for repeated light-touch qualitative observation over a single instrument, with a proposed semester-long protocol.
Reading & influences
Book · Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, Jill Mattuck Tarule
Maps how women experience themselves as knowers — including "silence," a position where women feel voiceless, deaf to their own thinking, and subject to external authority. It gave me a framework for what I lived: the years of listening were not empty; they were a way of knowing I had to grow through, not just out of.
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 · H. Richard Milner IV
This is the methodological spine of my dissertation. Researching the self, then the self in relation to others, then shifting from self to system — it is why the study is a self-study of my own classroom rather than an audit of somebody else's. The dangers I am least likely to see are my own.
Person · Lorna Wing
Her work is why we say spectrum. Neurodivergence presents uniquely, so a single checklist of characteristics was always going to mislabel somebody.
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.
Book · Uta Frith
Frith reads Itard's own notes on Victor and argues the evidence points to autism. A reminder that the archive often already holds the observation, and only the interpretation arrives late.
Book · Temple Grandin; Donna Williams
The point where lived-experience literature became a body of evidence. These are primary sources on the inside of an experience the clinical literature described only from outside.
Article · Seminar reading set, Fall 2025
Gave me permission to stop treating culture as a survey score. Culture is what people repeatedly do, and repeated doing can be observed.
Book · Course text
A quiet reframe of what I had been calling instinct. It deserves to be studied rather than simply trusted — that line rearranged my dissertation instincts.
Podcast · Podcast series
What I listen to while driving to the fieldwork site. The episode on abandoning your first coding scheme arrived at exactly the right week.
Book · Ann Arnett Ferguson
Ethnography, so it shows the thing that referral data can only imply: adults deciding, in the moment, which eleven-year-old is being a kid and which one is being a problem. "Adultification" is the term I was missing. It also models the method I would need if I studied racialized rigor honestly — you have to be standing there.
Website · Jill Morey
My own growing body of work in progress. Keeping it here as a placeholder and a promise — the citation list on this page should eventually end with things I wrote.