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