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| Lydia Brown (viewer's left) and Quentin Masten (viewer's right) Autism Campus Inclusion 2012 Summer Leadership Institute Autistic Self Advocacy Network |
Note to self: Someone needs to remind me to write a non-pretentious thing for this page.
Lydia Brown is an Autistic and multiply-disabled disability rights activist, scholar, and writer. She works as a Project Assistant for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, where she was previously an intern, and is a member of the National Council on Independent Living Youth Caucus, the Georgetown University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities Consumer Advisory Council, and the Board of TASH New England. Lydia was the 2012 Patricia Morrissey Disability Policy Fellow at the Institute for Educational Leadership Center for Workforce Development. In early 2012, she served on the National Youth Leadership Network's Outreach and Awareness Committee. Lydia is a student at Georgetown University, where she is actively working to engage interested students, faculty, staff, and administrators to establish, develop, and sustain a Disability Cultural Center on campus. For 2013-2014, she is serving as the Undersecretary for Disability Affairs in the student government (Georgetown University Student Association, or GUSA) executive branch.
In 2010, Lydia wrote a bill that would require education about autism for all law enforcement and corrections officers in Massachusetts that was refiled in both the 2011-2012 and 2013-2014 legislative sessions but has not yet been passed. Lydia's legislative advocacy has been recognized with an Honorable Mention by the Massachusetts Advocates for Children first annual Youth Advocate of the Year Award and by State Senator Katherine M. Clark. In 2011, she served on the Adult Services Subcommittee of the Massachusetts Special Commission Relative to Autism, which released its final report in March 2013. Lydia was one of six actually autistic people serving on the subcommittee, and she contributed recommendations related to community training and criminal justice for the subcommittee's report while regularly attending subcommittee and full commission meetings.
Lydia has also been active in lobbying against the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Massachusetts since about 2009. She provided written and oral testimony against the JRC's abusive practices before the Massachusetts Department of Developmental Services in a hearing on anti-aversives regulations and the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Children, Families, and Persons with Disabilities in a hearing on various anti-aversives legislation. Lydia was part of Occupy the JRC's National Day of Action protest in June 2012 and helped to coordinate the protest against the GED electric shock device at the FDA in January 2013. She co-presented on the history of the JRC and its practices with fellow activist Emily Titon and former JRC staffer Gregory Miller at the TASH New England conference in May 2012. Lydia is also the site administrator of the Autism Education Project, which provides resources and information about current cases involving autistic people and people with other developmental disabilities facing potential abuses in the criminal justice system and in schools.
Lydia has researched education for autistic twice-exceptional students and the portrayal of autistic characters in fiction. She is currently conducting research on the attitudes, habits, behavior, and experiences of autistic and non-autistic roleplayers. Lydia's writing has been published or republished by TASH Connections, the National Collaborative on Workforce and Disability for Youth, the Journal of the Asperger's Association of New England, the Boston Herald, The Georgetown Independent, The Georgetown Voice, The Fire This Time, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, the Autism Women's Network, Shift Journal, and the Thinking Person's Guide to Autism. Lydia has spoken at or given presentations for the TASH national conference, the DC Metro LGBTQ Studies Symposium, American University, the College of William and Mary, the National Autism Resource and Information Center, the Asperger's Association of New England's conference, Wellesley College, the DC Queer Studies Symposium, TASH New England's regional conference, Autreat, the University of New Hampshire Institute on Disability's Autism Summer Institute, DC Advocacy Partners, and the DC Consumer Action Network. To view a complete list of links to Lydia's other publications, republished pieces, news coverage, or other web references, see In the News and Elsewhere.
In addition to her policy work, advocacy, and activism around autism and disability, Lydia writes novels that explore the rhetorical and discursive constructions of self and family, society and culture, politics and government, crime, oppression, terrorism, spirituality, and ethics, as well as the consequences of those constructions on the lives of marginalized and privileged people and their interactions and relationships with one another.
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Image description: Lydia Brown, a young Asian female with black hair with glasses wearing a blue and green patterned plaid shirt, has her mouth wide open in an excited grin while pointing with both hands toward Quentin Masten, a young white person wearing a grey shirt with thin white horizontal stripes, who is smiling with closed lips toward the camera and wearing a mostly purple stretchy stim-toy with many stringy parts that can be pulled on their head.
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Image description: Lydia Brown, a young Asian female with black hair with glasses wearing a blue and green patterned plaid shirt, has her mouth wide open in an excited grin while pointing with both hands toward Quentin Masten, a young white person wearing a grey shirt with thin white horizontal stripes, who is smiling with closed lips toward the camera and wearing a mostly purple stretchy stim-toy with many stringy parts that can be pulled on their head.
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I use trigger warnings on my posts. These are a courtesy to people who may have phobias, anxiety disorders, or post-traumatic stress disorder, informing people who might experience extreme stress, anxiety, distress, dissociation, or panic at descriptions of certain topics or quotes of certain types of language that a post contains potentially triggering content.
