Shaping the dissertation question
Narrowing from "does belonging matter?" to "what small structures create it?" — a much harder, better question.
The first version of the question could only produce a yes. The new one can be wrong, which is the whole point.
It also relocates the study: away from students' feelings and toward the structures adults design and then stop noticing.
Related journal entries
- Finding my voice after fifty
Women have been socialized to cook and to listen for millennia. That was the family structure I grew up in. I did not find my voice until after forty — really after fifty — and it was not easy.
- Brad Lomax, Fannie Lou Hamer, Donald Galloway: living the intersection
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.
- "Don't mourn for us" — and the grief I had to unlearn
Jim Sinclair and Lorna Wing changed what I think a diagnosis is. And I have to admit that a small part of me grieved when my own child was diagnosed.
- The internet let separated people find each other
A layer of shared knowledge, community, and communication that changed who could be heard — and who stopped being alone.
- Grassroots expertise: Cheryl Poe and Maria Davis-Pierre
The people building the most useful support systems for Black autistic children and their families are not in the journals I was searching first.
- Positionality, and what I want Critical Disability Theory to do next
Where I stand shapes what I can see. And I would like us to retire the word neurotypical.
- What I first thought · I learned that · I wonder if
The prompt I gave the room at the end of the presentation, and the norms question I want every adult in a school to sit with.
- Racialized rigor: pushed harder, punished faster, measured against a standard nobody names
The demand is heavier, the grace is thinner, and the whole arrangement is delivered as care. I am trying to describe how racialized rigor actually shows up in a building — because until it is describable, it is deniable.
- From "othered" to included: the words came before the science
Neurodivergence and neurodiversity are not two names for the same thing. One asks what is wrong with this person. The other asks what is wrong with the room.
- Blame the mothers, then ask whose voices are missing
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.
- "Not an appendage": the year the subject started writing
Jim Sinclair's 1993 essay reframed a sentence parents said constantly, and I have not been able to unhear it.
- The internet did not create neurodivergent community — it removed the barriers
Before InLv and Autistics.org, many neurodivergent people lived in deep isolation and the true population ratio was simply unknown.
- Norms around us: the exercise I could not answer cleanly about my own building
I asked the room to name two or three norms at their workplace that might exclude someone with a different neurocognitive style. Then I had to answer it myself.
- The hallway is a curriculum
We keep asking why students disengage in the hall between classes. But the hallway is where the real sorting happens — and we've never once designed it.
- Why I can't just measure belonging
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.