The Loud Hands Project

Apr 11

The Loud Hands Anthology’s Tiny Print Has Been Fixed!

As many of you noticed, the print in the anthology was really small. Small enough that some of our contributors even had a hard time reading their own entries!

Our first run of the Anthology came back from the printer with much tinier print than we intended. Somewhere along the line, our original formatting was disturbed. This means that we got misprints of the anthology in a tiny font size.

Thankfully, our printer has been able to correct this error, so new copies of the Anthology won’t be in such small print! You’ll also note that this means that the anthology is around 100 pages longer in the new printings.

Already have your copy? Don’t worry- while we’d love you to buy another copy, we believe that you deserve access to what you already have.

If you got a misprint version with the tiny print, you can email loudhands@autisticadvocacy.org and we will send you a free PDF copy!

Should you choose to buy another hard copy, Amazon is currently selling them at a discount.

(Sorry, these don’t apply to the eBook version.)

Dec 10

On Amazon: Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking

The Anthology is now up and available for purchase! Just in time for holiday giving, you can now head to Amazon to share Autistic voices with friends, family, community, or even just for yourself.

“Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking is a collection of essays written by and for Autistic people. Spanning from the dawn of the Neurodiversity movement to the blog posts of today, Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking catalogues the experiences and ethos of the Autistic community and preserves both diverse personal experiences and the community’s foundational documents together side by side.” 6”x9”, 291 pages, paperback. $24.99 on Amazon.

The Kindle release is to be expected over the next week.

We encourage readers to review the book, film reaction videos, and more. We’ll have more on that later in the week, too!

Dec 6

The Loud Hands Project’s Anthology is coming to Amazon this Saturday, December 8th…

Are you ready?

Nov 26

Anthology News!

Pre-publication PDF copies of the anthology, Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking, are going out to the donors who pledged at the eligible levels.

If you donated $50 or more, or if you donated $20, during our Indiegogo campaign, you will be receiving it. (Those who donated at the $35 level received ASAN membership but not the PDF.) To see the full list of perks and their corresponding categories, please visit the Loud Hands Project Indiegogo page.

Didn’t get a chance to donate? Don’t worry, both hard copies and ebooks of the anthology will be available for purchase in time for the holiday season! We’ll let you know here on tumblr, as well as on our twitter and facebook.

If you would like to create a review of Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking, please email Julia Bascom at jbascom@autisticadvocacy.org.

Sep 19

Anthology Table of Contents!

Foreword

Historical Foundations
Don’t Mourn For Us
Autism Network International: The Development Of A Community And Its Culture
Critic Of The Dawn
The Future (And The Past) Of Autism Advocacy, Or Why The ASA’s Magazine, The Advocate, Wouldn’t Publish This Piece
Retrospective At The National Press Club (transcript)
The Beginnings of Autistic Speaking Day

Current Realities
Loud Hands & Loud Voices
Dear Younger Self
Loud Hands
Perfectly Autistic, Perfectly Me
Becoming Autistic, Becoming Disabled
Non-Speaking, “Low Functioning”
And Straight On Till Morning
The Incapable Man
Just Me

What They Do To Us
Quiet Hands
They Hate You, Yes, You
I Hid
Speech, Without A Title
This Is Why
Grabbers
Inhumane Beyond All Reason

Rhetoric
Why I Dislike “Person First” Language
Throw Away The Master’s Tools: Liberating Ourselves From The Pathology Paradigm
Killing Words
Disability Catch-22s
Like A Person
Why No One Counts
Passing As Ethics
I’m Spasticus Autisticus
Connecting Dots
Metaphor Stole My Autism
Why Autism Speaks Hurts Us
How Indistinguishability Got Its Groove Back

Voice
Plural Of Medium
Metaphors Are Important
An Ethnography Of Robotics
Socializing Through Silence
Are You Listening?
Advocacy: Everyone Can Do It
Pedagogy Of The Confused
The Meaning Of Self Advocacy
Autism, Speech, And Assistive Technology
Untitled
Run Forest Run: About Movement And Love
On Being Articulate
Loud Hands: I Speak Up With My Fingers
Accepting MY Normal

Moving Forward
Autism Awareness Is Not Enough: Here’s How To Change The World
To My Beloved Autistic Community On Autism Acceptance Day 2012
What I Want To Say To Fellow Autistics
Moving Forward: What’s Next For The Loud Hands Project

Conclusion
On World Autism Awareness Day

Sep 14

Loud Hands Project Website || Sections Preview!

The Loud Hands Project is designed to serve as a library and celebration of autistic culture for the autistic community. The initial sections of content include:

101: This is a place people can go to find basic explanations of the social model of disability, neurodiversity, self advocacy, etc. It is structured around core vocabulary and concepts, and presented as an interactive concept map. This is also the place for links to some basic, foundational documents: Don’t Mourn For Us, the ADA, etc. This is really foundational stuff for understanding neurodiversity, disability rights, and self-advocacy.

Historical Foundations: This is a place to explore the history and heritage of the disability and autistic communities. The Loud Hands Project has big plans for this section, including an eventual archive and interactive timeline. Initially, there will be a page of links to go to for the general history—although we may eventually develop our own content here, the initial goal is to make all of the great, comprehensive content on disability history already available online easier to find and conceptualize. We’re collecting an archive of founding documents of the autistic community, and those would be stored here, along with additional projects LHP is planning in the future.

Community Conversations: A huge component of the website, and one of its main purposes, is to facilitate the occurrence, several times a year, of community conversations around autistic identity, neurodiversity, self-advocacy, and other related concepts of relevance to our community. Examples of the conversations might be: what you wish you could have told yourself about growing up autistic; a response to a highly publicized act of murder, bullying, or abuse against an autistic person; a call to share writings or works by autistic people that made a profound impact on your life; what does being autistic mean to you; etc. A call for submissions will go out, an administrator will assemble & upload the results, and on the appointed day, a page will be unveiled where the responses can be viewed. It’s similar in concept to a blog tour, but submissions will encompass multiple medium (film, poetry, essays, letters, visual art, etc.) and have an extended time frame for preparation. Each Community Conversation will be archived on the site.

Blog: Content on the blog, as on all pages, might be written, visual, video, or a combination. We are looking for bloggers!

Anyone willing to contribute short writing for the 101 and history sections should email jbascom@autisticadvocacy.org

Sep 7

Anthology Authors!

Launch date is coming soon! In the meantime, we are proud to reveal the names of the authors who will be featured!

Jim Sinclair • Cal Montgomery • Ari Ne’eman • Corina Becker • Zoe Gross • Amanda Forrest Vivian • Julia Bascom • Bev Harp • Amy Sequenzia • Nick Walker • Steve Silberman • Paula Durbin-Westby • Kaijaii Gomez Wick • Amanda Baggs • Kassiane Sibley • Kimberly Gerry Tucker • Melanie Yergeau • Savannah Logsdon-Breakstone • Chloe R. • Anne Foreman • Meg Evans • Shain Numair • Karla Fisher • Elizabeth J. Grace • April Herren • Penni Winter • Alyssa Z. • E • Anonymous

Thank you to all our authors, and to everyone who submitted to our Anthology!

Jul 29

Loudhandsproject.com

We aren’t dead!

The Loud Hands Project has been hard at work for the last few months. Over the last few months, we’ve collected and sorted through an overwhelming pile of submissions for our upcoming anthology, solicited additional contributions and begun to assemble the shape of the anthology, filmed at two of the Allies In Self Advocacy summits held by the Administration On Intellectual/Developmental Disabilities and collected more interviews at Autreat, and begun development of content for our website.

Over the next several months, LHP has a busy schedule: we’ll be at the Autism Summer Institute at the University of New Hampshire in a week, filming at ASAN’s Autism Campus Inclusion Summer Institute the week after, and presenting at TASH and Autcom. We’re developing projects around disability history and employment; look for the trailer for About Us Without Us, our documentary project on eugenics and prenatal testing for autism, this fall. And of course, the Loud Hands Project anthology and website are both on track for their fall release.

Thank you for your ongoing support of the Loud Hands Project. Look for more updates in the coming weeks, and visit our Coming Soon page and sign up for our email alerts and announcements—so much is happening, we can barely keep track!

Mar 23

littlemissmutant:

joey-andromeda:

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of enjoyment from videos of people stimming, so I decided to make one of my own. The whole thing was filmed on naught but a webcam and an iPhone, and this was my first real attempt at video editing, so…yeah.

Yay it’s a stim video!

Your loud hands are adorable

Mar 16

We did it!

After 80 days, several interviews, too many tumblr posts, an ambitious blog carnival, hundreds of shared facebook updates and tweets, thousands of emails to families, friends, coworkers, and arch-nemeses, and a constant, concerted effort by the Autistic community to keep the momentum rolling and the energy building, fundraising for the Loud Hand Project’s first anthology and website ended at 11:59 pm PST with $15,610 from 224 separate donations.

We did it.

It feels unreal, but we did it.

We did it.

The original fundraising goal for the project was set at $10,000. We didn’t think we’d make it, but we figured that 80 days might give us enough time to come close enough, and perhaps a few people would hear about us and we could start laying down roots.

19 days later, we met our goal. Then we exceed it. Then we started to realize that maybe, just maybe, there was a more pressing need and a *hunger* for this project than we’d realized.

Maybe we weren’t alone.

61 days later, the timeline for our campaign on indiegogo ended. We spent those 61 days formalizing plans for the anthology, as well as future projects that would help center autistic voices and people, speaking. Since we made that $15,000 benchmark, one of those projects will be a documentary looking at conversations around eugenics. Others are planned, of course. We’ve got a list of film projects, we’re still taking submissions for the anthology—and will be up through April—and we’re talking website features, just as a start. This Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, we’ll be gathering footage for four separate projects at the Allies In Self Advocacy summit in Baltimore. Our campaign on indiegogo has given us an unbelievable head start, and we’re able to move forward now, secure in our roots and ready to do our donors and our community proud.

Thank you so much for giving us that start. The journey is just beginning. The anthology and website will debut this summer; we hope you’ll come along with us for the rest of the ride.

Humbly,

Julia Bascom, Loud Hands Project Organizer