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Purpose: Due to the developmental nature of autism, which is often diagnosed in preschool or elementary school-aged children, non-autistic parents of autistic children typically play a prominent role in autism advocacy. However, as autistic children become adults and adult diagnoses of autism continue to rise, autistic adults have played a more prominent role in advocacy. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the histories of adult and non-autistic parent advocacy in the United States and to examine the points of divergence and convergence.

Approach: Because of their different perspectives and experiences, advocacy by autistic adults and non-autistic parents can have distinctive goals and conflicting priorities. Therefore, the approach we take in the current chapter is a collaboration between an autistic adult and a non-autistic parent, both of whom are research scholars.

Findings: The authors explore the divergence of goals and discourse between autistic self-advocates and non-autistic parent advocates and offer three principles for building future alliances to bridge the divide between autistic adults and non-autistic parents.

Implications: The chapter ends with optimism that US national priorities can bridge previous gulfs, creating space for autistic adult and non-autistic parent advocates to work together in establishing policies and practices that improve life for autistic people and their families and communities.

This chapter documents how the process of grassroots community organizing through a family-focused model of local contestation liberates participants, mainly Black and immigrant Latina mothers in Chicago, from the constraints of individualization. While much philanthropic and academic interest focuses on the policy and quantitative “impacts” and “outcomes” of local social movements, the current study looks to local organizers to better understand their experiences and how they construct meaning through their participation. In-depth interviews and participant observations show how leaders gained collective purpose and voice through family-focused collective action. Community Organizing and Family Issues, a non-profit organizing institution, supported and propelled participants (leaders) to organize locally to create change in their communities, while it also facilitated conversions in self-perceptions. Leaders often discovered a sense of capacity, which contested gendered, raced, and classed oppression and self-doubt. Through the process of community organizing, leaders exercised power and dignity, facets that for the women in this study, were often ignored and devalued in society. These understudied social effects of collective action help us to better understand how marginalized women experience local social movements that cannot be quantified to fit narrow measures of movement “impacts” and “outcomes.”

The Ghana chapter on special education begins with the history of service provisions for persons with disabilities. It includes information on educational and rehabilitation services, special schools and integrated education. Detailed data is related concerning prevalence and incidence rates and special needs among the Ghana population. This is followed by a comprehensive section on regular and special education teacher roles, expectations, and training. An important aspect of Ghana’s special education is its movement towards inclusive education. The support for this movement comes from the Ministry of Education’s policy, namely, The Education Strategic Plan (ESP), which adopts inclusive education and promotes it as the future special education direction for the country. The chapter provides detailed information on the issues related to the implementation of the ESP plan, four models that have been developed for inclusive education, the progress and effort that Ghana has made towards inclusive education as well as significant challenges that are present.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the informal micro-level mechanisms through which caregivers maximize their health literacy and caregiving skill-set, particularly in cases of emergent, pervasive health disorders. Specifically, I investigate how important micro-level social factors, such as lay self-education and local community networks, mitigate extensive experiences of medical uncertainty that are associated with caring for a child with autism. This study theorizes a series of processes of becoming lay health care professionals (HCP), which serve as effective health care interventions and ways to secure vital resources for patients and their families.

This study uses qualitative research methods in the form of 50 individual intensive interviews with primary caregivers of at least one child under the age of 18 with an official autism diagnosis, as well as two years of participant-observation at two primary sites that are autism parent and caregiver resource meetings, both located in Northern California.

This study first demonstrates the major institutional limits and gaps involved in health-related caregiving for children with autism. Next, I define the processes through which caregivers challenge these institutional constraints and fight for life altering resources for their families, which include becoming a lay diagnostician and expert caregiver. Here, I demonstrate a sophisticated set of health literacy skills and key local community-based ties that caregivers develop and rely on, which affords families the tools to overcome diverse institutional obstacles in health-seeking and health care access.

The families in this study are predominantly white, middle-class, and reside in California. For future research, the scope of the study could be expanded by increasing the sample size and including greater geographic and demographic diversity.

This study contributes vital, yet missing, pieces to the autism puzzle, which currently focuses on prevention, the fight for a so-called “cure,” and the role of vaccines in disorder prevalence. In the meantime, families are living with autism each day and are struggling for understanding and knowledge, and to secure adequate support services. In doing so, this study sheds light on current institutional gaps and limits in health care and delivery for children with autism, and suggests specific effective health care interventions applicable to other cases of emergent illnesses and disorders.

This chapter explores how the case studies were ‘messy’ research. Because we were researching in contexts with many unknowns, the research process was unpredictable. ‘Tidying up’ the research in advance and working within clearly defined parameters was not usually possible. Across the case studies, mess occurred at different points and in different ways in the research process. For some projects, the design itself was subject to uncertainty and change; sometimes what had been planned was not possible; sometimes what had been planned was not the best course of action as the project progressed; and sometimes the design itself was emergent, requiring creativity and flexibility to meet the project outcomes. Some projects faced messiness when trying to combine methods and data. Others encountered messiness when collecting data, deciding what counted as data, and interpreting data. The real-world nature of our research and our need to be responsive to dynamic and often unknown out-of-school contexts meant that our methods could not fit into the neatly structured shorthand that is often used to think about (and teach about) methods. As researchers, we were constantly dealing with fluid and changing identities, as our relationships with participants and spaces developed during the project. This also means that tidying up our research could be counter-productive. The chapter concludes that making sense of mess in research can reveal understandings that are sometimes hidden. Mess and complexity, then, is something to be held on to, celebrated and engaged with, rather than tidied away.

Climate change has been identified as a pressing social, environmental and economical challenge that has been unequivocally linked to human activity through latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. It is here to stay with us for generations to come and is already causing severe tribulations across the world. As nations devise policies to mitigate to climate change to stay within the 1.5 degrees Celsius target and small island developing states (SIDS) like Mauritius and the developing world in general find means to adapt to its consequences, a core shortcoming highlighted is the lack of community engagement and grassroots action so that policies permeate to concrete action. Of prime importance for this to happen is raising awareness on the climate change phenomenon, which has so far been a topic deemed complex for the general public, hence creating systemic barriers for climate action. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) can play a significant role in designing such community outreach programmes based on outcomes reported in literature in the educational sector in support of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4: Quality Education. There is growing interest for a green lifestyle in the world population, and this chapter shows how the home can be used as a basic building block for allowing each household to contribute to climate action, while offering an effective case study to raise awareness on climate change through practical examples and demonstration, in support for SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities. Based on an energy-water-materials nexus, the circular home concept is a clear contribution to SDG 13: Climate Action, with huge potential to use AI techniques and underpinning technologies to implement and optimise the efficacy of the proposed measures.