tōjisha kenkyū: an overview
two or more autistic people, in collaboration with a clinician, in a non-hierarchical relationship. a good model — building meaning from the inside out — instead of being handed a pronouncement from above.
Month: September 2026
Autism & Accountability
How do we talk about repair, and who’s capable, in 500 characters?
“All autistic people can learn to be accountable for their actions, and to say otherwise is infantalizing and ableist.” Many variations on this theme are making their way through the platforms currently. While on the surface it appears well-meaning and affirming, it’s worth stepping back and considering the claim at face value, and how it…
Autistic Traits Are A Spectrum of Needs: Who Gets To Access Care?
What an ASD diagnosis actually buys you, depending on where you live, and your tax bracket
A diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder is often talked about as an endpoint — the thing a family or an adult has been chasing through waitlists and evaluations, the moment the puzzle finally has a name. But the diagnosis itself is an arbitrary designation. It’s useful for understanding needs. Whether it opens access to accommodation,…
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So Autism is Genetic: What Does That Settle?
Population as Organism: Epigenetics, Neurodiversity, and the Problem of the Individual
The Western neuroscience community has recently taken to saying that autism is genetic — a corrective, and a welcome one, to public claims, made from positions of real institutional power, that environmental exposure is the primary driver of rising diagnosis rates. The rebuttal leans on heritability: family studies put the heritable component of autism around…
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A Neurodiversity-Affirming Code of Ethics for Online Participation
Articulated as personal responsibility — what I hold myself to, not a standard imposed on others. The online public space serves overlapping, non-competing functions — information exchange, community formation, identity articulation, advocacy, and low-cost contact for people otherwise isolated by geography, access, or circumstance. No single function is the “real” one that the others distract…
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From the Inside Out
A Reading List in the Spirit of Tōjisha-Kenkyū · 当事者研究
Within Tōjisha-kenkyū lies the potential of rearranging the relationship between the tōjisha (the person with lived experience of the condition being studied) and the specialist — in other words, between experienced knowledge and specialized knowledge. . . . The mutual respect from the tōjisha and the specialist for each other’s knowledge, along with the collaborative…
what i brought with me
ever since i was young, i’ve felt like i was from a different culture, and was dropped into this one by a stork. somewhere along the way, i decided to stick by this, and honor the integrity of my original culture, and not get too deep into this dominant culture that i still feel like…
what does autism even mean?
peers, autists, human companions: lend me your cognitive architecture (ears are not enough). what we now call “autism” originally described a way of thinking that its own framers acknowledged that everyone experiences. If “autistic thinking” is something that everyone experiences, where is the line drawn between “everyone” and the autistic person? Is everyone temporarily autistic…
unfit
fitness, in the modern economy, is the ability to engage in any given task, for as little or as long as one is conscripted, without asking what the project contributes to; propelled onward by a belief that the designers of the project have our collective interests in mind; that the project is always becoming more…
call to action: mutual support for Tammy Zo
Our friend Tammy Zo (Pollard) needs our support. She is homeless, and in grave danger of losing her belongings, many of which are cultural archives and work that she has created herself. The fact that she needs our support is a consequence of our culture’s failure to maintain mutual support networks independent of institutional channels,…
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