Master of Ceremonies at ASAN Gala 2021

Join us for a special virtual edition of our annual celebration and fundraising event from Wednesday, November 17th through Friday, November 19th. We’re so excited to share the gala with disability community members and allies from across the country and around the world, who usually wouldn’t be able to attend in-person.

We’re happy to announce that Hari Srinivasan will be our Master of Ceremonies!

Image description: A young Indian American man in his 20s with black hair under a white baseball cap. He is wearing jeans and a long sleeved gray shirt that says California Golden Bears. He is standing next to a stone railing.

Hari Srinivasan is a minimally-speaking autistic student at UC Berkeley. He is on ASAN’s Board of Directors and a 2019 alumnus of our Autism Campus Inclusion program! At UC Berkeley, Hari is a student journalist for the Daily Californian, student instructor for a class on autism, research assistant at the UC Berkeley Psychology and Disability Labs, and was the first nonspeaking president of the student group, Autism:Spectrum At Cal. As a Haas Scholar, he is doing research on how autistic people experience awe. Hari was recently selected to serve on the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, which advises federal policy and priorities around autism. We are so grateful for Hari’s dedicated advocacy!

Hari hopes to bring attention to issues which impact disabled people in myriad areas and across the lifespan. He also wants to emphasize the urgency to include and address the issues faced by the more marginalized groups and higher support needs within the autism and larger disability community, including their mental, physical healthcare needs and comorbidities. When the voices of select groups get left out of the conversation, it negatively impacts their access to spaces, resources, funding, policy and quality of life.

We are full of autistic awe that Hari will host our annual gala and hope that you can come celebrate with us!

Gala tickets are donate-what-you-can, but no donation will be required to attend our virtual gala events. Proceeds will support our advocacy work and programs for the coming year, and allow us to continue working to empower disabled people across the country. If you’re able, please consider donating to support our work. If you are not able to donate, no worries -- we’re just happy to have you celebrating with us!

Honorees and other programming will be announced in the coming weeks.

You can RSVP to our Facebook event and invite your friends! We’re excited to celebrate together.

SPSS

 Another first coming up. I will be presenting my research poster at SPSS conference next Feb. 

My first Psychology conference. 

Writing an abstract

My attempt at the abstract for my research project.

Past research on emotions has viewed autistics from a deficit perspective, as lacking in empathy, emotion recognition and emotional experience; even as other research posits autistic emotion experiences as more intense; and we hypothesize that this could also be true of the autistic experience of positive emotions such as awe. This first of its kind study, draws on the science of awe to examine how autistics perceive and view awe, an emotion shown to have transformative effects. This research looks at how these dimensions of emotion may diverge in autistics from what has been written from a neurotypical (non-autistic) lens. With a target sample size of n=200, the study makes use of existing self-report psychological measures of emotions, includes a new empathy measure in development by the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab, as well as written narratives, from both autistics and non-autistic controls. Data from this study will add to knowledge on: 1) autism & empathy/ emotion recognition, 2) autism & emotional experience, 3) autism & awe. Potential applications include additional tools such as “small doses of awe” that can be added to the coping and navigating toolbox for autistics.

All that's wrong with this letter from RC

 All Indians MUST necessarily know Hindi,

ALL THAT’s WRONG WITH THIS LETTER on the Self-Determination Program from the CA Department of Developmental Services.

Someone at DDS decided that because I have an Indian origin last name.

1. My mother tongue must be HINDI; its not.

2. I MUST KNOW how to read the HINDI devanagari script. 

3. An automatic presumption on the part on the Hindi-speaking person at DDS who came up with this plan, that every person of Indian origin knows Hindi. 

Hindi is predominant in specific parts of the India only. Even if half the country knows Hindi, it marginalizes the remaining 650 million Indians in India who don't use it; the southern states being an example. There are 22 official languages in India… 

I found this very insensitive; almost reflective of the autistic/disabled experience where neurotypicals/nondisabled will assume that theirs’ is the only experience that counts. 

 Why are they making information on disability services more inaccessible here in the CA and wasting taxpayer money in the process. How many trees died in printing out thousands of these letters, how many mailman hours were wasted in the delivery these letters. 

Who got to decide this in CA; given its claim of being a more disability friendly state. This is really the last thing I expected in California. 

THIS IS WRONG!!

Haas Scholar Portfolio

Received some swag today,  a Haas Scholars portfolio, engraved with Haas Scholars . 

Spectrum At Cal First General Meeting

Another year kicks off with Spectrum At Cal's first general meeting

 

Social Media Mentions

 https://i-asc.org/a-boy-like-me/

Autism Decal Class#2

 Today our Guest Speaker was Prof Hinshaw on Stigma

A Ganesha Carrot

Ganesha shaped carrot from our garden

In time for Ganesha Chaturti

The historical moment or event I i wish I had witnessed.

The event I would have like to have witnessed is Buddha, sitting under the Bodhi tree and opening his eyes after receiving enlightenment. The moment would truly have been transcendent, as he spoke to those assembled before him, giving a glimpse into the incredible insights he had gained. 

Together We Can Learn Conference

I was Keynote Speaker 

https://familiestogetherinc.org/2021twcl/#hari

Haas Scholars Fall Colloquium

Presented my research at the Haas Scholars Fall Colloquium today.

Overall, got very positive feedback. 

Prof Brian Powers, Sociology: I’m really overwhelmed with the depth of this research and the impact it's going to have. Well thought out project, personal as it is. It’s incredibly scholarly.

Prof Dacher Keltner, Psychology: I think many of you know that Hari writes for the Daily Cal. When he was in my class, he would send me his poetry all the time. He is a brilliant writer and a brilliant thinker and I think you all felt that in that presentation. That was an incredible tour of 13 minutes and 47 seconds, from the personal to the humorous to the in-depth critique to the societal critique to the measures to the theory. I mean that, I’ve never felt, I’ve never had a presentation in my lab of that precision. The second thing is Hari’s presentation tells us why we need diversity in scholarship. His scholarship is just you know, its a devastating critique on measures and theories out there and we need these perspectives. What a rich perspective, so it was a remarkable presentation and he’s a remarkable young scholar.

 

 

#1 Public University

 

https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/09/01/uc-berkeley-no-1-u-s-public-8th-best-globally-in-times-higher-ed-rankings/?utm_source=15094&utm_medium=Twitter&utm_campaign=CAN

"UC Berkeley is the No. 1 U.S. public university, the sixth-best among publics and privates nationally and the world’s eighth-best university overall, according to the Times Higher Education‘s 2022 World University Rankings, released today.

The United Kingdom’s University of Oxford ranked first among private and public universities worldwide, followed by Harvard University, the California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of Cambridge, MIT and Princeton.

After UC Berkeley, Yale University and the University of Chicago rounded out the top 10.

As for the top five U.S. public universities, after UC Berkeley in first place, UCLA ranked second and in 20th place globally, followed by the University of Michigan, (24th); the University of Washington (29th) and UC San Diego (34th).

The Times Higher Ed World University Rankings evaluated more than 1,600 universities across 99 countries and territories based on five criteria: Teaching (the learning environment), research (reputation and volume income), citations (research influence), industry income (knowledge transfer) and international outcome.

Overall, UC Berkeley ranked sixth in the world for research with a score of 96 points out of 100; 14th for teaching (85.7 points); 21st for citations, (99.1 points) 104th for industry income (84.7points) and 235th for international outlook (staff, students and research) with a score of 77.6 points."

View the complete list of Times Higher Education 2022 World University Rankings rankings.