A Brief Guide to Some Autistic Resources on Autism

At my practicum today, I got into a brief discussion with someone about autistic writings on autism (and related issues) and the sheer quantity of autistic educational resources on the subject available online.

In the end, I promised her a brief guide to the sites and such that I thought she should know of. This is by no means complete -- it's just a few of the resources I could think of off the top of my head.

Autism Network International was the first real autistic autism organization and, to this day, remains the centerpiece of the autistic community. While rather plain, the ANI website contains a good bit of useful information, notably including a great deal of information on ANI's annual conference/gathering, Autreat.

ANI's coordinator, Jim Sinclair, also used to have a personal website with some very significant articles -- including several of the seminal works of the autistic community. While it's no longer on the 'net due to the actions of its web-host, it's still easy enough to get to those resources thanks to the Internet Archive.

Other notable autistic organizations include AutCom, the ASAN, and GRASP. Of them, I'm associated with two (AutCom and the ASAN) and have mixed feelings about the third. Despite this, it cannot be denied that GRASP has a pretty large set of articles available, many (if not most) of which are very much worth reading. AutCom also has an article library, but my opinion on the matter is that said library is very much in need of updating and housekeeping.

Autistics.org hosts a wide variety of resources, as well. While their resource library is the most obvious (even if it needs updating and expansion), it's hardly the only one. Amanda's non-site, ISNT, and even Amanda's blog are all excellent reads.

Speaking of blogs, the Autism Hub is the best place I know of to find autistic bloggers. Keeping an eye on the Hub's update lists (and the articles) means effectively keeping an eye on the back-and-forth discourse of the autisic community... or at least a notable subsection of it.

Neurodiversity.com, hosted by Kathleen Sidel, contains an extensive collection of indexed links to resources on pretty much any autism-related topic you can think of.

Up in Canada, autistic autism researcher Michelle Dawson hosts a site called No Autistics Allowed. Beyond her excellently-researched, extremely thorough commentary on some of the issues with ABA, NAA also has a number of articles on... well, quite a bit, notably including a lot on the Canadian government and her dealings with them.

And, of course, that's just the beginning.

Edit: In my initial posting of this, I forgot to mention this list. Very, very extensive list of links. Admittedly, the list focuses on a single issue, but many, if not most, of the resources it links to don't.