Category: Announcements

Tower Hamlets Autism Wednesdays – September 2024

Sarah will be speaking about the Empire and the work that we do at the Tower Hamlets Autism Service’s Wednesday social group.

This group is run by THAS and is for anyone who has been diagnosed with autism by THAS.
THAW runs monthly on a Wednesday from 17:30 until 19:00 – alternating online and face-to-face in a cafe in Mile End.

You can learn more about Tower Hamlets Autism Service here: https://www.elft.nhs.uk/services/adult-autism-service-tower-hamlets

Specific Strategies for Neurodivergent Caregiving – StarSPD Conference 2024

“It is now a fairly common experience for many autistic adults to receive their diagnosis after taking their children on a diagnostic journey. But what about the undiagnosed autistic adults caring for autistic relatives who have not realized the parallels? Sarah McCulloch, an autistic adult, activist and mental health occupational therapist, will outline some of her experiences and challenges working with this population and offer some strategies for autistic people and professionals aiming to work with families holistically.”

More information:

https://sensoryhealth.org/basic/virtual-summit-supporting-caregivers-and-families-their-sensory-health-journey

The Shop has now relaunched

After several years of drift, we have now shifted our online shop from Shopify to Woocommerce and this is now available online.

We have now removed many of the products we used to have such weighted blankets and sensory toys as the market has now shifted and these are much easier to obtain for a reasonable cost from Amazon. When we started these were considered specialist products you had to pay as high prices from specialist disability platforms, but the mainstreaming of neurodiversity means this is no longer case and other companies can now operate at scale.

We currently have five t-shirt designs available and because we have set up a dropshipping feature, it is very easy to create new designs, if you have any particular requests please email us at team at autisticempire.com.

We continue to try to get our shop mirrored to Amazon but this is actually incredibly not straight forward and so it continues to be an ongoing concern.

An Update since Autistic Pride 2021

In 2021, Autistic Empire founder Sarah McCulloch spoke at Autistic Pride Online on the journey of developing autistic identity.
In that talk, she analysed the unfolding controversy about the film Music, released by Sia that year. A short extract:
“[w]e have substantial numbers of autistic people who deny that they are autistic but have an affinity for autistic people, so they get involved in the autistic community and autistic advocacy from the perspective of supporting autistic people, when really, they’re just promoting internalised neurotypical ideas about who we are and what we do, which is damaging to them as well as us.
…
So that was the majority narrative of the film. But what I would like to suggest is what if we shifted our perspective and saw Sia as an autistic person who felt some kind of kinship with the identified autistic people in her life, and made a film about being autistic, that reflected all of the contradictory, medicalised, and pathological framing and language that professionals use about us and *autistic people often use about themselves*, and then had a meltdown when publicly criticised for it? How would we have treated her differently then?”
Sia recently went on a podcast to says she has known she was autistic since 2021, so good to know that Sarah wasn’t the only autistic person to have noticed.
Welcome to your tribe, Sia.
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You can watch the full 23 minute talk on the Autistic Empire YouTube Channel here: