Month: June 2023

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Delighted to see that the CofE has finally chosen to (partially) divest from fossil fuels. But there’s a certain muteness re: mea culpa here. Bill McKibben puts it best in his newsletter today: “in the early weeks of the divestment campaign in 2012 I traveled to London, in part for a meeting with the CofE executives. They were…totally disdainful of the divestment campaign, insisting that their approach of ‘engaging’ with these companies would work.”

I have also experienced this disdainful attitude, which was not quietly held, but on quite public and triumphalistic display by leaders across a variety of events including the CofE presence at COP and a variety of policy workshops. To be fair, many activists have been actively challenging this attitude, but it has been entrenched for decades.

There is some really interesting work to be done here, analysing how this came to be, the (not small) impacts that this public display had across a variety of fora where these executives shared their “leadership” on sustainable investing and how resilient this position will be in light of future pressures.

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I’ve been thinking about Four Thieves Vinegar collective work lately. It’s an inspiring project (at least imho): https://fourthievesvinegar.org/ Social justice meets DIY, design hacking and hardware all towards anti-capitalist access to medical care. But I’ve also been wondering about what it would look like to do this for mental health and neurodivergence. What would it look like if radicals subverted psychometric assessment for the common good in the same way?

I know folx in the community do tend to use open sourced tools like https://embrace-autism.com/ in this kind of way. But what’s the next steps to either (a) develop an instrument that can be authorised for use as a self-certified dx or (b) pry the process out of the hands of monetising forces like Pearson. Truly there are hundreds of thousands of people who are being denied access to legally mandated accommodation and care because they can’t get access to assessment.

Let’s set aside for a moment of course the problems with the notion of “experts” gatekeeping in this way, but hey maybe there’s a hack for that too? Long game I see a lot of promise in the power threat meaning framework (cf https://www.bps.org.uk/member-networks/division-clinical-psychology/power-threat-meaning-framework) but I think we’re a long way off from mainstreaming that approach…

#psychology I’m looking at you here… Anyone want to do a bit of hacking?

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I’ve given two talks this summer to colleagues in my school. This arises from work I’ve been doing learning from and supporting neurodivergent students in Philosophy, Theology & Religon departments in an ongoing support/tutorial group since 2020. They’re brave and amazing students, and I’ve learned so much from them! I realised it was high time that I shared some of that information with colleagues, and it was a lot of work synthesising what I’d been thinking about and trying to open it up to others, particularly thinking towards others (neurodivergent or not) who hadn’t been on the self-learning and unmasking journey I’ve been on.

Do please feel free to have a look at the slides and let me know if you have thoughts. I’ll be continuing to revise and present this work.

https://jeremykidwell.info/slides/presentation-20230614-teaching_neurodiversity/presentation-20230614-teaching_neurodiversity.html#1