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

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

Feb 27

February Update

Loud Hands Project: February Update

It’s been a quiet but productive time for The Loud Hands Project since we passed our initial fundraising goal of $10,000 on January 14th, after just nineteen days. Since then, we’ve:

-given interviews about the project for AWN’s radio show (http://www.blogtalkradio.com/autism-womens-network/2012/02/03/the-loud-hands-project) and on Joyce Bender’s Voice Of America: Disability matters (http://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/59769/ari-neeman)

-worked on finalizing plans for the anthology, website, and future projects and taken an inventory of equipment needs

-begun receiving submissions for the anthology

-expanded our FAQ section on our tumblr (http://theloudhandsproject.tumblr.com/post/16126946761/questions-answered)

-sent out a second call for video clips for a project around autistic community, autistic identity, and passing (http://theloudhandsproject.tumblr.com/post/18096311025/call-for-video-clips)

-finished our first wildly successful Loud Hands Project Blogaround (http://theloudhandsproject.tumblr.com/post/18143366933/third-and-final-part-of-our-blogaround-recap)

-continued raising money—we’re now at $12,170 with 175 donors.

Overall it’s been a successful few weeks of laying a firm foundation, and we’re in a solid place now to gear up for our last two weeks of fundraising. That’s right—we only have 18 days, or two and a half weeks, left to raise money. Our fundraiser on indiegogo (http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Loud-Hands-Project?a=351448) ends March 15th. How much do you think we can raise by then?

We’d like to make $15,000.

The first 19 days of fundraising was a bit of a wild ride for the autistic community. There was a real hunger and a need for The Loud Hands Project, and people rallied together and pushed to meet the goal. It was equally incredible and overwhelming. We’re wondering if we can recapture that energy for our last 18 days of fundraising.

We’ve raised enough to build a website this spring and put together our anthology, our founding, guiding document, an explanation of what it means to have loud hands. But the anthology has always been meant as only the beginning for this project, which we envision as an expansive, transmedia forum for both celebrating autistic comunity, identity, and culture and simultaneously insisting that these things exist and are worth perserving.

That is a huge undertaking. We live in a world that isn’t entiely convinced that autistic people have minds at all—to change the conversation to one that recognizes we have voices at all, let alone valuable ones? That’s going to take an enormous investment of time and effort. Rome wasn’t built on a day, and it definitely wasn’t built without any funds or resources.

Which brings us back to fundraising. 18 days. Our goal: $15,000. Will you help us?

As you can see on indiegogo (http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Loud-Hands-Project?a=351448) we have a few next steps for the project already outlined. If we can make $15,000, we’ll be able to beging production on one of those steps—a video called “About Us, Without Us.” ”About Us, Without Us” is a video about the Autistic community and our place in the conversation around eugenics and the prevention of autism. If we make the $15,000 benchmark, we’ll be able to pay for Julia to go on the road and collect interviews and footage, and cover production, editing, and initial distribution costs. Does this sound valuable to you? Will you help us make this goal?

If you want to see The Loud Hands Project move forward, past the anthology and into a tool for centering autistic voices and experiences in conversations about us, we hope you’ll help us out. Share this update, and the link to our indiegogo page (http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Loud-Hands-Project?a=351448) around. Donate if you can. Tweet it, facebook it, tumblr it, email it to your grandma, your coworkers, your cousins, your best friends and your arch-nemisis. Ask if they’ll pass the project along to their networks, too—the more people who know, the better our chances for success. Tell them why you want to see this project succeed, and ask if they’ll consider making a tax-deductible donation, starting from $10, to get us there. This is not the time to be shy.

We only have 18 days left. Let’s make them count.

Jan 28