Autism Vox

Autism Vox Top 10 of 2006

by Kristina Chew, PhD on January 11th, 2007

When I agreed to start writing Autism Vox back in Charlie at Autismland, I thought it would be a good opportunity to express my opinions and ideas (such as they are) about education for autistic children and to advocate for the best services possible for autistic persons throughout their lifespans. I am an autism mother of a now 9 1/2 year old boy with some very significant learning and talking challenges (to name a few), I am a college professor, and when ever I have to indicate my “area of professional expertise,” I check the box beside “education.”

Autism Vox went live in April and I settled into posting about special education, the occasional research study, and made mention of a few new books.

Then came May.

May is always a special month to me because it is the month of Charlie’s birthday and this one was tinged with a particular load of meaning, because the previous two years had been very difficult ones for Charlie and so for my husband, Jim Fisher, and me. But this May had more in store.

On May 13th, a three-year-old autistic girl named Katherine McCarron died. Her mother, Dr. Karen McCarron, was charged with killing her. I wrote a number of posts about Katie McCarron in May and all through the summer and into the fall and beyond, and include two of those posts here, I don’t have a title for this post about Katherine McCarron’s mother (June 8, 2006) and Let’s Not Blame the Victim: A Call for Restraint and Responsibility (June 22, 2006). I think often of Katie.

And I kept writing.

It was summer and Charlie had Extended School Year and I was not teaching classes in ancient Greek, Latin, and classical culture and advising students. I had time to catch up on reading some books about autism. I also started to write about them, usually over a series of posts (a full list of these reviews can be found in the right-hand column of Autismland). The literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans also found its way into some posts about Classics and disability, and helped me think through some ideas for a scholarly article about the notion of the “bad” (kakos) in Sophocles’ Philoctetes.

Summer ended, autumn came, Charlie went back to school full-time and I went back to teaching—-and Jim threw himself into organizing and promoting Autism and Advocacy: A Conference of Witness and Hope, which I’ll hazard saying was the first conference on the “varieties of autism advocacy”—in matters educational, spiritual, social, and more—to be held in an academic setting. Back in early May, I had posted a list of fighting words—cure, epidemic, devastating, mercury, train wreck, tragedy, stolen child, plague—sometimes used to refer to autism, and often used in discussions about certain autism issues that, when I started writing Autism Vox, I was not sure how to discuss: I am not a scientist; I have no training in disciplines such as psychology, politics, government, public policy, statistics, medicine; my background is in the study of the literature and languages of the ancient Greeks and Romans and in particular in the philological study of those cultures’ texts.

Philology is from the ancient Greek words philos, “friend,” and logos, “word, reason, account.” Philology particularly means to study literary texts to determine their authenticity, original form, and meaning, all by careful reading of the words of a written text informed by knowledge about the language the text is written in. Philology is the love of the word, of language, of literature—-of precisely those things that my son Charlie, whose speech is very, very delayed and who is just learning how to read, is not altogether enamored of. Classical philologists look carefully at the language of ancient Greek and Roman texts to determine meanings hidden and lost over the course of time—-and sometime in the late fall of 2006 I started to apply this philological analysis to autism texts, as represented by the last three posts of my Top 10 List (and by two recent 2007 posts, David Kirby on “there is no autism epidemic” and Autism Vox on his rhetoric and Epitasis and Aposiopesis: On Dan Olmsted’s rhetoric). What not so readily discernible meanings (and perhaps, agendas) are hidden in contemporary writing about autism? Why do we keep hearing about an “epidemic of autism” and that “it can’t just be better diagnosis”?

I hope you’ll keep reading Autism Vox in 2007 to consider these questions and more, and that you’ll keep asking me questions and offering your critique and your opinions and ideas. I describe this blog as “autism mother gets on her soapbox” but the truth is, I can only stay on it with the help of all of you.

Advocacy. Witness. Hope.

1. I don’t have a title for this post about Katherine McCarron’s mother (June 8, 2006)
2. Let’s Not Blame the Victim: A Call for Restraint and Responsibility (June 22, 2006)
3. The [autistic] Child is father of the [autistic] Man (July 5, 2006)
4. Engaging Floortime (3): Floortime for Parents (Review of Engaging Autism by Stanley Greenspan) (July 19, 2006)
5. “Do you think that I’m autistic anymore?”: Growing up with autism in Kamran Nazeer’s Send in the Idiots (July 28, 2006)
6. Scapegoats and Disability (September 6, 2006)
7. Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism by Roy Richard Grinker (October 1, 2006)
8. What’s in a name: The “Hidden Horde,” TV, and a Diagnosis Called Autism (October 20, 2006)
9. The Autism Numbers (November 30, 2006)
10. Why are we seeing more autism?: “Environmental injury” vs. “better diagnosis” (December 22, 2006)

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POSTED IN: Autism Advocacy Conference, Autism Lit, Books, Classics, Diagnosis, Disability Rights, Education, Medicine, Psychology, Statistics, Stereotypes, Weblogs