Blogception: Blogging about Blogging

After three weeks, I finally finished my blog post about autism representation in media, and I'm really proud of how it turned out. I'm a little worried it may be too long, but everything in there is important. If needed, I could probably separate it into good representation and bad representation, but it looks good for now. Along with this post, I created a list of various movies that engage in autism representation, ordering them from really good representation to really bad representation and a short explanation why I placed them where I did.  With thinking about next steps, I've been planning my next post for this blog. Over the years, I've noticed that autistic people and other disabled people tend to act as metaphorical "canaries in the coal mine." When places are inaccessible, when attitudes create barriers, and when people are secretly terrible human beings, it's disabled people that experience these things first. They're the crash test dummies...

This week in class, we talked about how having a diversity of stories is extremely important in creating a complete picture of a culture, and how this can help us to better achieve cultural humility as occupational therapists. This is an idea that I agree with very strongly, especially because, for the last two weeks I've been writing a post on autism representation in media for my new occupation. In our OT Professions class this week, we talked about how only having one story about a population can lead to stereotypes that alienate the population we intend to represent, and I think this tendency has a huge effect on media representation of autism.  Often, representation in media of autism shows a white autistic man who is able to speak, and other characters see this person as socially repugnant, cold, burdensome, and generally difficult to interact with. Often, this character is only accepted by the other characters because of what they can contribute with their special skills. Ob...

Over the past few weeks, I've thought a lot about various forms of autism representation in media. My own blog is, itself, a form of autism representation. Because of this, I figured it would be useful to talk about various forms of autism representation as a big part of my blog. Originally, I had planned to go through a few of these examples individually with a blog post each, but then I realized that it would be most useful to talk about autism representation in media as a whole: what it means to represent autism well, how to do it, and how others have failed in this arena. This is a pretty complex topic, so this week's blog post isn't quite done yet, but I am making good progress. So far, I have come up with a few criteria for what makes autism representation good. Participation, or inviting input from the autistic community when creating autistic characters. Research, which includes both learning about autism as a medical condition and learning about the lived realities...

 When writing my weekly blog post earlier today, I thought it was ironic that the focus of my writing was my current struggle in regulating my focus on important things. This week, we have our anatomy midterm, and this weekend, my brain was much more interested in making a Halloween costume for my cat than studying for said midterm. This motivated me to spend this week's blog post talking about the topics of special interests and hyperfocus within the autistic community, and how these topics applied to me. This is a topic that I find pretty interesting, especially given the fact that I created my blog because of a special interest in autism itself.  I was a little worried I wouldn't be able to finish this week's post, given the business before a midterm, but I was thankfully able to complete it with some time to spare. For future weeks, I have plans of writing about a variety of media depicting autism and my opinions on that media. It'll be interesting to see what other...