This session shares our journey of building a cross campus and community partnership to amplify autistic voices through the Photovoice method. Using Photovoice methodology, we built a partnership between UW-Madison’s Disability Cultural Center, NeuroPride (a student-led campus group), Department of Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education, and local disability advocacy organizations.
Together, we engaged autistic adult self- and community advocates in documenting their lived experiences of advocacy through visual storytelling. Through the project, participants created visual advocacy boards and engaged in collaborative analysis. However, our partnership was not built overnight. We will reflect on the process of coming together across identities and roles, and the small moments that shaped our collaboration.
We will share what we learned. For example, we will share the moments that surprised us, the questions that remain open, the specific approaches we tried, challenges, and successes encountered in building these relationships, including how power dynamics were navigated, how participants were compensated and supported, and how findings were translated into community conversations. We will invite attendees into a discussion of what inclusion and co-leadership look like.
In addition, we will highlight several of the visual advocacy boards created by autistic self-advocates, letting their images and words guide the session.
Attendees will take part in a short reflective storytelling exercise—their own mini-advocacy storytelling exercise that mirrors our photovoice approach. We will close by sharing how we’ve sustained this partnership beyond the original project, including what’s still unfolding.
Rebecca speaks to the tender, surprising, and deeply creative experience of inhabiting autism as a way of being.
In this session, she invites participants to reflect on their autistic identities through the lens of beauty as a powerful form of activism. Rebecca believes that when our community knows who we are - individually and together - and we claim it as our birthright, our collective capacity for creativity, innovation, and wellbeing is infinite. We come into a power that cannot be taken away by any government or regime.
Together, we will explore how reclaiming our identities as beautiful not only strengthens our collective wellbeing but also deepens our ability to stay rooted in possibility when traditional supports fall short.
Participants will leave the session with a renewed sense of reverence for the strength of who we are together.