University through the eyes of autistic students and staff

Work related experiences of autistic university staff receive scant research attention and this contribution seeks to slightly reduce the size of a very large hole into which this area of enquiry seems to have fallen. Research which aims to identify barriers to higher education participation identified by autistic students is a little more prolific and examples are discussed here. Striking overlaps between the narratives of autistic people working and studying at university emerge in this review. Conclusions are drawn from the available evidence about common approaches which could benefit autistic employees and learners alike. These shelter largely under the universal design (UD) umbrella and are generally obvious and uncomplicated. UD can potentially benefit everyone because the approach involves planning for diversity rather than being surprised that the mythical norm is actually imaginary. The ethos of UD is congruent with the anticipatory anti-discriminatory duty of The Equality Act (2010). A model which has acquired the acronym REAL is discussed as a way to conceptualize good autism practice within a UD paradigm with the potential to benefit everyone. The approach is informed by a commitment to equality as a social justice concern. REAL stands for: reliable, empathic, anticipatory and logical. As staff-focused sources are so limited, in comparison with research evidence about student experience, they are supplemented here by illuminating comments from autistic academics. The twelve people who contributed either provided information on post-it notes at a meeting of the Participatory Autism Research Collective (PARC) or responded to a call from an autistic researcher to provide insights for a book chapter. A common denominator is the experience of practices which impacted negatively on the possibility of full participation as researchers and /or lecturers in higher education. Most alarming was the recurring theme of providing autistic expertise to research without proper financial compensation. The emergence and purpose of PARC as a vehicle for autistic scholars to collaborate is discussed. Although the collective’s reach is far greater now, PARC originated from The Critical Autism and Disability Research Group (CADS) at London South Bank University (LSBU). Participants regularly echo the contentions of autistic contributors to this paper that that they are seldom remunerated justly for their contribution to autism research. CADS operates within the Centre for Social Justice and Global Responsibility at LSBU and paid autistic co-researchers are always central to our autism research. This policy decision is a point of principle informed by a social justice ethos, the principle being ‘nothing about us without us’ (Charlton, 1998, p1). The extensive use of detailed unedited quotations from autistic contributors here reflects the centrality of unfiltered autistic voices to this contribution

A Practical Response to Ableism in Leadership in UK Higher Education

This chapter is based on research undertaken for the Leadership Foundation in HE (LFHE). It views the experiences of disabled leaders through the lens of ableism and considers ways in which the sector could positively address ableist practices in order to promote equality and diversity

The Metanarrative of Cancer: Disrupting the Battle Myth

This book explores multiple metanarratives of disability to introduce and investigate the critical concept of assumed authority and the normative social order from which it derives. The book comprises 15 chapters developed across three parts and, informed by disability studies, is authored by those with research interests in the condition on which they focus as well as direct or intimate experiential knowledge. When out and about, many disabled people know only too well what it is to be erroneously told the error of our/their ways by non-disabled passers-by, assumed authority often cloaked in helpfulness. Showing that assumed authority is underpinned by a displacement of personal narratives in favour of overarching metanarratives of disability that find currency in a diverse multiplicity of cultural representations – ranging from literature to film, television, advertising, social media, comics, art, and music – this work discusses how this relates to a range of disabilities and chronic conditions, including blindness, autism, Down syndrome, diabetes, cancer, and HIV and AIDS. Metanarratives of Disability will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, medical sociology, medical humanities, education studies, cultural studies, and health

What Communities Can Do to Rein In Payday Lending: Strategies for Successful Local Ordinance Campaigns through a Texas Lens

Because New Mexico has one of the highest consumer usage rates and highest concentrations of payday and title loan shops in the nation,2 we thought it would be an ideal place to measure the public’s knowledge of and interest in these ubiquitous loans. We also measured knowledge of interest rate caps in the context of credit cards, as a point of comparison. Our data are consistent with that of previous studies showing that the general public overwhelmingly supports interest rate caps both in general and for certain types of loans. More uniquely, we also found that many consumers are unaware that there are no interest rate caps on many forms of consumer loans. These data are useful in explaining why consumers do not do more to change the law on interest rate caps

Shrinkage Estimation in Multilevel Normal Models

This review traces the evolution of theory that started when Charles Stein in 1955 [In Proc. 3rd Berkeley Sympos. Math. Statist. Probab. I (1956) 197--206, Univ. California Press] showed that using each separate sample mean from $k\ge3$ Normal populations to estimate its own population mean $\mu_i$ can be improved upon uniformly for every possible $\mu=(\mu_1,...,\mu_k)'$. The dominating estimators, referred to here as being "Model-I minimax," can be found by shrinking the sample means toward any constant vector. Admissible minimax shrinkage estimators were derived by Stein and others as posterior means based on a random effects model, "Model-II" here, wherein the $\mu_i$ values have their own distributions. Section 2 centers on Figure 2, which organizes a wide class of priors on the unknown Level-II hyperparameters that have been proved to yield admissible Model-I minimax shrinkage estimators in the "equal variance case." Putting a flat prior on the Level-II variance is unique in this class for its scale-invariance and for its conjugacy, and it induces Stein's harmonic prior (SHP) on $\mu_i$.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-STS363 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Fast Fourier Transforms for the Rook Monoid

We define the notion of the Fourier transform for the rook monoid (also called the symmetric inverse semigroup) and provide two efficient divide-and-conquer algorithms (fast Fourier transforms, or FFTs) for computing it. This paper marks the first extension of group FFTs to non-group semigroups

Domination parameters with number 2: interrelations and algorithmic consequences

In this paper, we study the most basic domination invariants in graphs, in which number 2 is intrinsic part of their definitions. We classify them upon three criteria, two of which give the following previously studied invariants: the weak $2$-domination number, $\gamma_{w2}(G)$, the $2$-domination number, $\gamma_2(G)$, the $\{2\}$-domination number, $\gamma_{\{2\}}(G)$, the double domination number, $\gamma_{\times 2}(G)$, the total $\{2\}$-domination number, $\gamma_{t\{2\}}(G)$, and the total double domination number, $\gamma_{t\times 2}(G)$, where $G$ is a graph in which a corresponding invariant is well defined. The third criterion yields rainbow versions of the mentioned six parameters, one of which has already been well studied, and three other give new interesting parameters. Together with a special, extensively studied Roman domination, $\gamma_R(G)$, and two classical parameters, the domination number, $\gamma(G)$, and the total domination number, $\gamma_t(G)$, we consider 13 domination invariants in graphs $G$. In the main result of the paper we present sharp upper and lower bounds of each of the invariants in terms of every other invariant, large majority of which are new results proven in this paper. As a consequence of the main theorem we obtain some complexity results for the studied invariants, in particular regarding the existence of approximation algorithms and inapproximability bounds.Comment: 45 pages, 4 tables, 7 figure