Reflection Questions
1. What were the biggest accomplishments or successes you achieved in 2022?2. What were the biggest challenges or difficulties you faced in 2022?
3. How did your relationships with others change or evolve in 2022?
4. How did you contribute to your community or make a positive impact in 2022?
5. What changes or shifts did you notice in your priorities or values in 2022?
6. How did you take care of your physical, mental, and emotional health in 2022?
7. How did you expand your knowledge base in 2022 through coursework, conferences, or other academic experiences?
8. How did you develop your critical thinking and analytical skills in 2022?
9. How do you envision your trajectory in the future, and what steps will you take in 2023 to work towards your goals?
10. What did you learn about yourself in 2022?
An Awesome Year
An Awesome Year
A sobering reality: I continue to have a ton of autism challenges and have not made much headway on those year after frustrating year much to my sorrow. They do consume a good part of my day; almost 95% of my life. I do wish that we as a society find solutions to those - both on the non-medical and medical front. However I also want to focus on the positives in this post because those give meaning for me to keep going even as I hope and search for solutions on other fronts. So here's the 5% awesome part even as they are tempered by the other 95%.Awesome 2022
2022 was an awesome year.
An awesome year it was.
Like the tortoise (in Hare & Tortoise), I took slow strides.
Each autistic step - a belief in the Possibility of Me.
#redefine_the_table, #Hari_as_possibility
From Possibility comes Opportunity
Meeting the President and the Vice-President
First time to meet with VP Kamala Harris at the Naval Observatory.
A second time I went to the White House where I got to shake President Biden's hand.
What an incredible incredible honor.
Who could have imagined stuff like this for me.Getting an invite to the White House.Meeting the President of the USJust how awesome is that!!
I graduate from UC Berkeley
I'm a college graduate in year 2022. It feels so good. This was a kid that was not even expected to get a high school diploma. My lot was to be in special education and not aspire for much more. Education was the candy in the candy store with me firmly told to be outside.
This was a degree ++ with dollops of unexpected extra bonuses. I absolutely am relishing it.
How awesome is this?I am just so darn proud of that yearned for degreeYoung man, you must be doing some stuff right.Cuz. along with degree there was even moreAdditional appreciation in the most unexpected forms.
University Medal Finalist, I sit on Commencement stage with Chancellor & a Nobel LaureateDepartmental Citation, I give the Department Commencement SpeechHighest Distinction (other universities call this Summa Cum Laude)Phi Beta Kappa, Psi Chi and 4.0 GPAAwesome icing on a Berkeley degree
Undergraduate Research
A special shout out to Leah Carroll who runs and is the glue that holds the Haas Scholars program together. She kept us to timelines and managed resources to help us get our resource done. And there was a lot of resource management logistics involved, like getting those participant gift cards out through Bear Buy.
I presented my research at 2 Academic Colloquia (Jan & April), and a SPSS (Society for Personality and Social Psychology) Poster Presentation in Feb. And I continue to work with Prof Keltner to get 2 papers (on awe and empathy) to publication.
I had a wonderful an encouraging mentor for my research in Prof Dacher Keltner.
How awesome is it......to research awe in autistics....be mentored by an expert in the science of awe.
Just how awesome is that?
Senior Honors Thesis
I submitted my thesis on awe to the department in April - all 66 pages of it.
This was a faculty comment about my thesis
- This is truly an excellent honors thesis! The research topic is incredibly important and interesting, and it is unique to probe the autistic experience of awe in comparison with that of neurotypical individuals. The results are very cool, interesting, and complex. Although this is brand new research and more empirical data are needed, the preliminary results, which argue against the emotion deficit view of autistic individuals, are potentially groundbreaking. I hope you will pursue this work further and I hope we will see the work published in a psychology journal in the near future.
I think back to when early educators did not want me in their classrooms and every evaluation report and IEPs were a litany of my "lack of accomplishments," or "lack of progress." In fact during my first special ed kindergarten placement, the teacher sent home a note which essentially said that she was concerned at my lack of progress in the first 6 weeks in her classroom. This was to be a repeated story in the all the multiple special ed classrooms I was shuffled around in.
Autism Decal
The Daily Californian
PD Soros Fellowship.
The news was only to be released in April when 30 scholars graced a full page of the New York Times.
The fellows met at a 4 day conference extravaganza in New York in October.
Daisy Soros sure is a powerhouse at 94 - I am in awe!!
We fellows chatted, met with famous alum, toured New York and more - the Met, a Broadway musical, a Jazz club and a formal cocktail hosted by Daisy Soros. The conference sure was a lifetime experience and what an amazing cohort to be in.
Getting into Grad School
I'd applied to grad school last fall.Results in early spring.Decision deadline Apr 15.Headed to Vanderbilt for a PhD in Neuroscience in Fall.
Can you believe this guy from grade 8 special ed now actually headed to grad school?
Media Coverage
I got multiple mentions in various UC Berkeley sites. Daily Cal covered me (a turnaround as I usually write the articles). I even made it to an article in Forbes. There was coverage in many Indian American newspapers and at Vanderbilt too.
All the coverage felt a little overwhelming yet I am totally grateful for all this acknowledgment of my accomplishments. (It helps counter the years and years of trauma build up with the reports of, will never amount to anything, claims)
From California to Tennessee.
It is a new place to adjust too! Transition and autism are not the best of bedfellows.
It's pretty hot here in summer, a little too hot. But it's also green and lush with lots of rain. The grass is green even in winter due to the rain. Rain-starved California sure could use some of this rain (just not this week as I hear there are Bay Area mudslides due to heavy rains!!).
Grad School @Vanderbilt from Fall
- Grad School orientation
- A Lab Coat Ceremony with my own Personalized Lab Coat
- A Neuroscience Retreat
- Lab Rotation at SENSE (Social Emotional Neuroscience Endocrinology) Lab
- Participate in the SENSE Theatre workshop.
- An own office space at the research lab with my name on the door.
- NISE Fellow at the Frist Center for Autism and Innovation at Vanderbilt.
- Did well on the academic front (Synesthesia, Multisensory Integration)
Survived first semester.....
Still adjusting, lots of figuring out left to do... a work in progress the next few years.
Fingers crossed that my unpredictable autism challenges let me travel this journey well.
And make useful contributions along the way.
But really, just how awesome has this year been?
Vacations
Hope for an (equally) awesome 2023
In the Possibility of Me?
Dare I hope from others
....Surrounded by folks who are patient, encouraging & empathic of my disability
... Make kind friends outside the classroom
Slow purposeful strides, an elephant I want to be.
... Relish learning and knowledge coupled with endless curiosity
... Use Advocacy & Research to add more pebbles that widen ripples in the pond of change.
... Giant leaps on the journey to emotional equanimity (mood continues to be tough nut)
... Learn to better manage & cope with the vagaries of my unpredictable disability which can feel like a leaky boat.
UC Berkeley Top Stories 2022
Snow gone but deer here
Snow covered foliage for few days with snowfall on Dec 23 and then again on Dec 26. Though the snow had started to melt, housebound as roads were still slick with black ice from melting snow. Finally able to venture out.
I can't even begin to imagine places like Buffalo, NY which are still heavily snow-bound.
Snow gone but the deer are still here.
Author of the Social Model of Disability
What I learned today from Cal Montgomery. Thx Cal.
Vic Finkelstein, not Mike Oliver, was the author of the social model. Oliver's book just hit big in the U.S.Feisty and Disabled.
First Nashville Snow
Snowfall
Snowfall in the darkness of night
Green grass out of sight in morning light
A blanket of winter white on the ground.
Leafless snow laden trees, a background
Undeterred deer saunter around
Munching twigs quite nonchalantly
Baby deer hunker on the ground... to keep warm
Brown fur contrasts on the white ground.
A winter's delight for the eyes.
But when it hardens and turns to black ice
Beware, for it can be a dangerous drive.
Housebound for 3 days...Winter break, so ok.
2022 UC Berkeley News Recap
https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/12/13/top-stories-from-2022/
Synesthesia and Autism
Instructor Feedback: you wrote an excellent essay! Your essay was engaging to read and provided compelling insight into synesthesia and autism. You succeeded to find intriguing papers at each level of understanding and used those references effectively. The concise way of writing reveals a true talent to distill the key messages from complex papers from (very) diverse fields and to use them for your argument. This was overall very impressive to see! you wrote an excellent essay ! Overall, we grade your essay with an A+ Keep up this good work.
Happy Platinum Birthday Judy
(and an early 101th birthday greeting as well)
Short video of my greeting.
Media Mention
"In the book, I talk about this where I said that I'm more of a fan of the term high support needs and low support needs, because I tend to think that functioning labels really flatten the experience. Because if you call someone low functioning, what it does is it gives a lot of incentive to almost patronize them or to say they're not going to amount to much, so we don't need to invest that much in them. Whereas I think that if you call people high functioning, it almost kind of erases the very legitimate needs that they have. That binary doesn't do anybody good, I don't think. A perfect example that I used when I was writing this book is that I profile a woman by the name of Aria. That's a pseudonym.
She's married, she has kids, all that, but she had trouble graduating college and she had trouble finding work. Whereas there's this young man I profiled, his name is Hari Srinivasan. He is non-speaking. He just graduated from Berkeley a few months ago. He's now started graduate school at Vanderbilt University. At that point, when you think about those things, you have to ask yourself, "Okay, by those standards, who's the high functioning and who's the low functioning one?" You realize that that binary just is... It doesn't work."
In a Different Key
The webinar is up at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=039eGaw2Q1w
A very relevant question in the face of a society that is underprepared to meet the needs of the ever increasing number of autistic adults of today who will go onto becoming the aging autistic seniors of tomorrow.
This is one of my responses in the webinar.
About the movie I want to start with a comment. What I absolutely love about this movie was the utter genuineness of autism. And highlighting how others treat autistics is both DARKNESS and HOPE but there is a chance to BELONG.
To give you a perspective on what autism can look like, A little more about myself, On the disability front, I do have significant challenges that present multiple obstacles to my everyday living. Having limited communication skills is just the tip of the iceberg of these issues and I do need constant care for most aspects of daily living. On the other hand, I like to think I also have strengths which have carried me here all the way to graduate school where I hope to do meaningful research that contributes to knowledge and solutions in the autism space.
I happen to straddle aspects of two often seeming disparate worlds. So I will go to the HEART OF THE DEBATE.
It troubles me that there is such a divide between both worlds, when I think ultimately both worlds often have the same long term objective. I often feel we are wasting time and resources arguing with each other instead of getting real work done.
I don't think it's an either-or situation. That it has to be this model or it has to be that model, with no room for negotiation in between. That it is a pure Medical Model which says the solution lies in medicine alone or a pure Social Model which says society has to accept and accommodate us and nothing more needs to be done.
I agree that all of us need and yearn for that ULTIMATE GOAL OF BELONGING, like what we saw Donald Triplett was living and experiencing with his community in the movie. That is what the Social Model is. That is indeed the ultimate dream.
But do you think that same community would be as accepting and inclusive of an autistic adult who had constant meltdowns, who was displaying self-injurious behaviors, who had significant social anxiety and a range of health issues to boot. Guess who is left holding the baby, so to speak. It comes down again and again to the family to cope and manage the best they can in terms of finances, resources and time. No wonder those families ask, what after us.
Believe me, life is far from a happy optimistic picture for not just the families but for these autistics too. Even providers don’t want to work with us, let alone society. I have peers stuck at home because no adult day program will take them due to behaviors. Group housing does not want the adults with behaviors. So where do they go? I have peers who can have a dozen seizures a day. I have peers who have to be on the toilet all night due to gut problems. Sleep for just 2 hours a day means both the autistic and family are sleep-deprived. And this stuff does not magic away in adulthood. Providers just get harder to find as you age, as everyone wants an easy case. I’ve had providers quit on me after just 2 days. The happy life of Donald Triplett will slip further and further away.
I want and yearn for belonging but I’m also beginning to realize that perhaps there are some missing steps, almost like accommodations to how to help adults and kids with more significant challenges. Maybe those solutions lie in understanding physiology and in underlying health and medical issues.
Unfortunately any movement towards those solutions is deemed as the evil medical model and therefore taboo, which is very frustrating. We are conflating health issues with cure. We are getting sidetracked honestly with this debate. I don’t think anyone deserves to be engaged in self injurious behaviors and be experiencing extreme mood swings which make inclusion almost a non starter. No one deserves to wake up in intense gut pain like me in my younger days and have it be thought of as something that can only be addressed with behavior therapy. And when behavior therapy does not work, because you are looking at the wrong thing, you are pushed into an even worse special education classroom as then you are deemed in capable of improvement and inclusion. Any dream of belonging goes up in smoke.
If your body internally feels better, and you have less health issues it will reflect in outward happiness and a better quality of life. What’s wrong with finding solutions? What’s wrong with looking for solutions on multiple fronts. We can all agree our environment has gotten more toxic and it is causing more and more significant health issues world-wide. Maybe some of our solutions are somewhere in that arena. Just medicating us with psychotropics can’t be the only solution, which also have their own long term health effects. Proactively taking care of your health and well being is not pathologising. We have to research solutions, so that guys like me and others with more significant issues can also dream of moving about in society with ease, and have a chance at opportunities and belonging like Donald Triplett.
At the same time I am so incredibly amazed by the strengths and possibilities I see in the autistics who are able to get out there in society and be able to avail of opportunities. There is so much unlocked TALENT and potential which can bring about significant changes in the world. It is very critical for autism to also be looked at from a STRENGTHS-BASED perspective for that acceptance, inclusion and belonging piece.
In fact, I would like to see this TALENT HARNESSED IN FINDING SOLUTIONS for the ones with more significant issues, so they too have the opportunity of inclusion and belonging. Solutions lie in many fronts, from medical research to policy to societal attitudes to caregiving issues to inclusion. We also help solve the unemployment problem this way by making everyone across the spectrum, especially those who have the desire to work, become part of the solution for all. So it can be a win win for all.
I also want to point out to a Sins Invalid principle of Disability Justice which says when you address the needs of the most marginalized, you address the needs of all. In fact I would point out that I admire that Donald Triplett is a healthy active senior but I doubt if many of us will be as healthy. Current research seems to point to a lot of health issues we are going to have as aging seniors. If you get a chance read Alice Wong's piece on caregiving for her recent health crisis. Isn’t it better to find solutions on both health issues and caregiving now when we are able to do something about it rather than when we are all tottering senior citizens. So I want every autistic and family member and ally to think about how they can be part of the solution.
So it's almost like we have different degrees of needs and some of us have legs in many issues so we need solutions on many fronts. Why then are we having factions and fighting?
=================
The mother – co-director Caren Zucker – undertakes a journey seeking answers to the unknowable: will the non-autistic majority embrace and protect her child when she is no longer here?
Our Guy Donald
Autism Diagnosis in Minority Communities
Proof of not learning
It's really amazing how many things are considered proof of not learning.
Last Day of Class
LASR - Laboratory of Affective Sensory Research
Next Sem I will be rotating at Prof Carissa Cascio's LASR Lab (Lab for Sensory Affective Research) https://www.casciolab.com/
Belonging v Inclusion
https://youtu.be/saQu9tv8MVU
The message on the importance of BELONGING is still very relevant.
The Adult School by Sense Theatre
The play is about a bunch of demotivated students (featuring both autistic and NT actors) who make sense of "growing up" when they cross paths with an inspiring teacher.
I'm in Dr Corbett's Sense Lab this semester and she asked me to take part. So I added lines for character I called "Harry" (but of course!!) into the play, in 3 of the scenes - to be spoken out. Speaking is still a work in progress and my voice is still too low to carry across a theatre. So Rachael Mustatello acted as my echo, and repeated what I say in a louder voice.
Collaboration-Cooperation
My hero, Judy Heumann turns 75 on Dec 18th. Happy Birthday Judy!!
Back in 2019 I had the opportunity to interview the legendary disability civil rights activist, Judy Heumann, for UC Berkeley's "The Daily Californian".
What an amazing conversation it was too. I prepared for the interview by reading up everything on her online, including the 466 pages of oral interviews archives of the Disability Rights Movement in UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library.
Of course with any newspaper article, there is a word limit, so any writeup goes through multiple rounds of edits and reorganization of material and focusing on just a few things, so a lot of the conversation ends up getting left out. But Judy had so much advise for us disabled folks. So here is my longer early uncut/unedited draft of our conversation (with a lot of her original quotes) so we can continue to learn from her.
=========
Collaboration-Cooperation: A conversation with Judy Heumann
It was therefore a privilege to interview UC Berkeley alumna Judy Heumann, a lifelong civil rights advocate for people with disabilities and a leader in the DRM. It was a pleasure discussing these issues with her as it not only improved my own knowledge but also make me think and kept me on my toes, as she would at times turn the questions back on me, and ask me for my thoughts.
Any introduction to Huemann cannot do justice to her accomplishments. An incomplete list follows. Heumann became a wheelchair user due to childhood polio, and has challenged the system at every turn from a young age. She had been denied access to her school as she was considered a fire hazard. She sued and won the right to a teaching license from the New York Board of Education. She was involved in the United Nations Convention of the Rights of People with Disabilities and in the passing of important disability legislations in the US like IDEA, Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. She has worked in key roles for the Clinton and Obama administrations, the World Bank and is a senior fellow at the Ford Foundation.
We started the conversation on when disability rights “solidified” into an actual movement. According to Heumann, the movement had started in the late 1940s itself but just became more prominent after World War II. But in terms of impact, given the CDC numbers of 56 million people with disabilities and 1 billion worldwide, Heumann feels the movement has far from solidified, is still emerging and very much in a developmental period.
We then discussed what had changed between the DRM in its earlier days and now. She pointed out though the DRM had been around for fifty to sixty years, initially cross-disability groups worked separately. She attributed one of the big changes to the “recognition we needed to be able to come together [cross-disability] on important pieces of legislation started in the late sixties, seventies and resulted in many things including our ability to get the ADA passed,” It was the realization that they were not going to get the support of elected bodies like state legislature and the congress unless they came together. A larger group also meant more sophistication and the ability to have a wider agenda like the “inclusion of disability related issues outside of the disability community,” said Heumann.
“Recognition we needed to be able to come together [cross-disability] on important pieces of legislation ... resulted in many things including our ability to get the ADA passed."
She also drew attention to my being able to work for the Daily Californian as an excellent example of laws like IDEA and ADA at work. She pointed out that before 1975 at least 1 million disabled children were not allowed in schools. “A very important part of what is slowly happening in the US is students, including students with more significant disabilities are going to school and like you have gotten into Berkeley, a highly prestigious school and I presume you are getting accommodations at school and you are obviously feeling more a part of the school because you are going out for things like writing for the newspaper. So I think that’s slowly what’s changing,” said Heumann.
“A very important part of what is slowly happening in the US is students, including students with more significant disabilities are going to school and like you have gotten into Berkeley, a highly prestigious school ... you are obviously feeling more a part of the school because you are going out for things like writing for the newspaper.”
The conversation then turned to the current pressing issues in the DRM. Heumann could not overstress discrimination, which can come through lack of awareness, the ramification being “denying us opportunities.” One barrier is that many who are disabled are not identifying as disabled, so part of the challenge was to help people become stronger and see that discrimination was wrong regardless of who it was impacting in the disabled community.
“I think when we feel we are being discriminated against, we need to talk about it as such,”
"Employers need to look at disability like they are looking at other diversity communities"
There is currently a huge disincentive for people with more significant disabilities on Medi-Cal and Social Security benefits from being productively employed.
From the viewpoint of an outsider, Heumann felt a critical issue in the autism arena is to help ensure that people with communication disabilities (whether it is autism or other disability like deafness) get mechanisms and technology in a timely manner with the presumption of competence. “Whatever the cause of the different types of communication, we need to be working with children really really early on and trying different mechanisms that can work,” said Heumann. She pointed to the new non-profit Communication First, of which she is a director, working to advance the civil rights for people with communication disabilities.
“Whatever the cause of the different types of communication, we need to be working with children really really early on and trying different mechanisms that can work,”
Heumann also thought the message being given to families of children with autism at the time of a child’s diagnosis depends on “people’s perceptions of what we are or are not able to do.” So she encourages families to interact more with organizations like ASAN and spend more time with adult autistics so that families have a better understanding of the richness of the community. Autistics need to spend time with other autistics and have available a variety of mentorship programs (ASAN program being an example), but on a regular basis, to get a positive understanding of what is possible.
Heumann laughingly credited her Brooklyn origins to her personal qualities quoting the saying, ”New York City - if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” On a more serious note she pointed to fortitude as a personal strength as, “at some point I really had to make a decision as to whether or not I was going to allow discrimination to adversely affect me without fighting for change.“ She added that networking is also important to her as she likes to work with other people and stressed that for networking “it’s important to also have friends from diverse communities.”
“At some point I really had to make a decision as to whether or not I was going to allow discrimination to adversely affect me without fighting for change.“
Change itself may take time, but in the meantime we cannot accept no... We need to be fighting for an end to discrimination for all people and for collaboration- cooperation.”
The conversation then turned closer to home, to her time in Berkeley and the Bay Area. Heumann had needed to do a masters after suing the New York Board of Education for a teaching license and had been accepted into Columbia. Heumann stated that she may not have joined UC Berkeley if Ed Roberts had not reached out initially and sparked her interest. They had not known each other before then. Roberts had been calling to identify emerging leaders and asked if she would be interested in two campus departments - Public Health and City & Regional Planning - that were then recruiting students with disabilities. With the help of the late Prof. Henrick Blum, who later became her faculty advisor, she joined the School of Public Health in 1975.
In the Bancroft Library’s Disability Rights and Independent Movement Oral History Project archives, containing 466 pages of interviews with Heumann- she had stated that “For some reason, in graduate school I didn't feel the same kind of fear around tests.” As a Berkeley student I just had to ask if that was due to being in 'Berkeley.' Heumann laughingly agreed that part of it had to do with being in Berkeley because “it was really very exciting to be able to be around so many disabled people that were fighting for the same thing, you know fighting to strengthen our movement and to remove barriers and it was also easier to socialize because you know Berkeley is much smaller so one could get around this city much easier.” She added that academically, graduate school was also more essays, class participation, discussions and smaller classes focused more narrowly on a field of study which made it easier.
Heumann then spoke of her years in Berkeley with the CIL and the WID. Highlights for her was how they were learning to work together with other political organizations and different groups all fighting for equality. She stressed that they were doing work cross-age (from children through seniors), cross-race and cross-disability with organizations like the Asian Health Clinics to what used to be called the Over-Sixties Clinic (Collaboration-Cooperation). She also liked how the CIL was growing with a staff reaching 200 at one point.
This was also the time when they were “learning how to network effectively, establishing goals and timelines about when we want certain things to happen and living up to them,” said Heumann, which proved useful at the time of the 504 sit-ins. Heumann pointed out that much of what she had been saying during the course of this interview was an important part of what happened with 504.
The Rehabilitation Act had been passed in 1973 itself, with Section 504 of the law finally giving voice to the issue of discrimination by stating that any program that received federal funds could not discriminate against anyone with disabilities. Section 504 is widely regarded as the first disability civil rights law in the United States. However. Secretary Joseph Califano was not signing off on the 504 regulations. A law without regulations to enforce its implementation essentially has no teeth. Heumann pointed to the cross-disability organization American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities (ACCD), of which she was a member, leading the effort to get the regulations out of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW). The disability community had been growing increasingly unhappy with the stalling. ACCD finally issued a deadline ultimatum and followed through with demonstrations and sit-ins at eight HEW regional headquarters all over the country. The 28 day long San Francisco federal building sit-in at by 150 people with disabilities was crucial in swinging the momentum towards signing of the regulations by Califano.
Heumann felt a reason the Bay Area 504 sit-in was so successful was because the CILs played an important role and California had way more CILs before any other state. By 1976, California had eight CILs versus one in Michigan and one in Massachusetts. As a result, “we were able to organize, we were able to work with labor unions we had good relationships with the media and I think all those things resulted in our ability to be successful with the 504 regulations,“ said Heumann.
She would like to remind disabled students and their allies to go online and look at the Power of 504, a video produced by the Defense Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), Drunk History and her Ted Talk to learn more about 504. For Heumann, the 504 demonstrations underscore the importance of collaboration as they were supported not just by the disability community but by other groups like unions, church groups, farm workers, etc. The 504 regulations helped set the stage for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
I also asked Heumann what advice she would give for the younger generation?
Heumann started off by telling students that working inter-generationally and cross-disability, “will strengthen our engagement [as] we have different levels of knowledge and expertise.” Its the power of collaboration-cooperation. She also pointed out that a major weakness of the disability movement is that it is not documented enough. Knowing “where we’ve been and where we are [helps us with] where we want to go.” So she advises students to know your history, for knowledge made you better equipped to play a meaningful role. Then, when you come across an opportunity or barrier that affects the community, you will know if its a tech issue or something else. The “where we want to go” part is also an important part of the intergenerational and cross-disability discussion.
Knowing “where we’ve been and where we are [helps us with] where we want to go.”
“I know a disability cultural center is going to be happening” on campus, stated Heumann [note: UC Berkeley did get a Disability Cultural Center in 2021]. She added that disabled students should not just limit themselves to disability organizations but also consider joining or working with other cultural centers so that you can learn from each other. “Do not be fearful of speaking up and looking at creating change” said Heumann.
For students in other countries, Heumann advised looking up the growing number of disability organizations in those countries and seeing if you want to work with them. She also added that students should get involved in issues that the previous generation did not have to contend with like the impact of the environment and climate change.
“Use social media more, reach out, speak to more groups and continue to work collaboratively and invite people in to speak so that we can be learning and talking together” said Heumann.
“Use social media more, reach out, speak to more groups and continue to work collaboratively and invite people in to speak so that we can be learning and talking together”
@harisri108 #Redefine_the_Table #autism #belonging