M. Ariel Cascio

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Assistant) at Michigan State University

Understanding and improving how diverse people work together is a core concern of applied social sciences. This article reports ethnographic observations on a participatory design project in which researchers and adults on the autism spectrum worked together on the design of a new technology—biomusic. Biomusic uses a smartphone application and a we...

**Read it via SharedIt: https://rdcu.be/b3suO** Brain-based identities, especially around autism, have received much attention in recent literature on biopolitics through concepts such as brainhood, cerebral selfhood, and neurochemical selves. This article complicates conversations about self and brain by presenting ethnographic data about Italian...

Research ethics is an important part of any study. Ethics goes beyond ethics committee approval and consent documents. It addresses broader issues of respect, inclusion, and empowerment in the everyday context of research. This article focuses on everyday aspects of research ethics for studies involving autistic participants. It draws on a review o...

Medicalization is increasingly recognized as a bidirectional process, with patients and their families as agents. The paper considers the specific case of the medicalization of autism in Italy, from the point of view of parents of autistic people with different levels of support needs. Through reporting and comparing results of two independently co...

Remote interviewing has become even more common since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and allows greater accessibility for many interview participants regardless of pandemic circumstances. This accessibility is especially important in the context of my research with autistic individuals. However, it may also expose interview studies to the same...

Objective There is an urgent need for research on eating disorders among individuals with disabilities. This paper highlights the lack of research on the relationships between disabilities and EDs, despite their common convergence. Method In this paper, we aim to 1) highlight the need for further research investigating the relationships between dis...

Autistic children often receive support for mental health and emotional challenges through community-based group-format cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). CBT is manualized, but in community settings, interventions tend to not be delivered as intended. Inherent individual preferences and behavioural challenges in autistic children often lead to i...

Challenges with functional communication (e.g., language use in situational contexts), are a core feature of autism. Challenges in functional communication are related to social interaction difficulties and may impact engagement in interventions such as cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). CBT is a common intervention used to support emotion regula...

This chapter provides an overview of the Healthcare Education Engaging Disability Studies Program (HEEDS). HEEDS is an innovative approach to a medical curriculum change that helps to diversify healthcare students’ knowledge of disabled patient populations and fosters compassionate practice techniques, especially in working with autistic patients a...

Childhood Studies scholars have increasingly engaged with the concept of neurodiversity, particularly with respect to neurodivergent children's mental well‐being. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the history of the neurodiversity movement in Italy, and the consequences on children's mental health, drawing on eight in‐depth interviews with mo...

Introduction The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities asserts that all persons with disabilities have the right to receive the support they require to participate in decisions that affect them. Yet, persons with dementia continue to be excluded from decisions on issues that matter to them. Our planned scoping review...

Background: Autistic children typically experience challenges when navigating social and emotional contexts, and these experienced difficulties can subsequently have notable effects on their mental well-being.1 The Secret Agent Society: Small Group (SAS:SG) program is a multi-component manualized intervention for autistic children between 8-12 ye...

As previous research has observed, medical students and physicians alike confront vast amounts of knowledge in their education and practice, such that no one clinician can know everything there is to know about biomedicine. Even before clerkships, medical students learn to cope with this impossibility by prioritizing certain information based on it...

The term diagnostic odyssey refers to patients' difficult journeys to obtain a diagnosis, particular in the case of rare or contested illnesses. This paper describes the diagnostic odyssey of patients with New Daily Persistent Headache (NDPH), a rare headache disorder notable for its persistence, resistance to treatment, and impact on quality of li...

People with disabilities (PWD) comprise a significant part of the population yet experience some of the most profound health disparities. Among the greatest barriers to quality care are inadequate health professions education related to caring for PWD. Drawing upon the expertise of health professions educators in medicine, public health, nursing, s...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1016/j.pmedr.2022.101881.].

The specific relationship between sexual coercion, intimate partner violence (IPV) during pregnancy, and intimate partner homicide (IPH) is poorly understood. Through a scoping literature review, we identified 101 studies on sexual coercion, IPV during pregnancy, and IPH and created a conceptual model suggesting unintended pregnancies may serve as...

Autistic women have higher rates of anorexia nervosa (AN) than the general population and poorer treatment outcomes than nonautistic AN patients. Gender roles, stereotypes, and expectations play heavily into diagnoses of both autism and AN. The goal of this project was to identify aspects of current treatment approaches that fail to meet the needs...

Competence” is a longstanding value of American biomedicine. One underidentified corollary of competence is efficiency: at once a manifestation of competence, a challenge to competence, and a virtue in its own right. We will explore the social construction of efficiency in US undergraduate medical education through an analysis of its sociocultural...

Context Clinicians use brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to discuss neurodevelopmental prognosis with parents of neonates with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) treated with therapeutic hypothermia (TH). Purpose To investigate how clinicians and parents discuss these MRI results in the context of HIE and TH and how these discussions could...

This study analyzed the physical health status of adults who belong to a sexual or gender minority (SGM) population, and whether health inequities correlate with access to quality healthcare. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 2014-2020 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) included data for 64,696 adults who identifi...

Many services can assist autistic people, such as early intervention, vocational services, or support groups. Scholars and activists debate whether such services should be autism-specific or more general/inclusive/mainstream. This debate rests on not only clinical reasoning, but also ethical and social reasoning about values and practicalities of d...

Media reflect and affect social understandings, beliefs, and values on many topics, including the lives of autistic and disabled people. Media analysis has garnered attention in the field of disability studies, which some scholars and activists consider a promising approach to discussing the experiences of – and for promoting social justice for – a...

Scholars and activists debate whether people on the autism spectrum should access autism-specific services or general/inclusive/mainstream services. This article presents quantitative results from a mixed-methods survey of autistic adults and parents/guardians of autistic people in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States. Respondents...

A partire dal confronto di tre ricerche empiriche, questo contributo si pone l'obiettivo di ri-flettere sulle principali sfide metodologiche ed etiche connesse alla conduzione di ricerche qualitative che prevedono la partecipazione delle persone disabili. Più in particolare, i tre casi studio sono stati selezionati strategicamente, ovvero sulla bas...

Across societies, cultures, and political ideologies, autonomy is a deeply valued attribute for both flourishing individuals and communities. However, it is also the object of different visions, including among those considering autonomy a highly valued individual ability, and those emphasizing its relational nature but its sometimes-questionable v...

**READ IT AT https://rdcu.be/b4bIb** Growth in autism research necessitates corresponding attention to autism research ethics, including ethical and meaningful inclusion of diverse participants. This paper presents the results of a review of research ethics literature, strengthened by consultation with a task force involving autism professionals, f...

Diabetic retinopathy (DR), a common chronic complication of diabetes mellitus and the leading cause of vision loss in the working-age population, is clinically defined as a microvascular disease that involves damage of the retinal capillaries with secondary visual impairment. While its clinical diagnosis is based on vascular pathology, DR is associ...

Research ethics scholarship often attends to vulnerability. People with autism may be vulnerable in research, but are also vulnerable to unjust exclusion from participation. Addressing the needs of participants with autism can facilitate inclusion and honor the bioethics principle of respect for persons while accounting for risk and vulnerability....

Journal of Humanities in Rehabilitation, https://www.jhrehab.org/2020/05/07/whats-at-stake-with-biomusic-ethical-reflections-on-an-emerging-technology/ Biomusic is an emerging technology that translates emotionally salient physiological signals into sound/musical output. It has been proposed to have utility as an assistive technology in many conte...

Research ethics extends beyond obtaining initial approval from research ethics boards. The previously established person-oriented research ethics framework provides guidelines for understanding ongoing ethics throughout the tasks of a research project, in a variety of research contexts. It focuses primarily on the relational and experiential aspect...

Empowerment in research is important in many autism and autistic communities and an important part of ‘nothing about us without us’. It is also an important component of person-oriented research ethics. This article reviews the literature on ethics in autism research for information related to decision-making empowerment for autistic people. A revi...

This chapter presents an outline of the history, politics, and lived experience of autism in Italy and Brazil, illuminating key similarities and differences. It focuses on the contemporary dilemmas around autism in these countries, particularly the historical developments of Psychiatric Reform (PR) in both countries, and how the post-reform epistem...

Research Involving Participants with Cognitive Disability and Difference: Ethics, Autonomy, Inclusion, and Innovation provides timely, multidisciplinary insights into the ethical aspects of research that includes participants with cognitive disability and differences. These include conditions such as intellectual disability, autism, mild cognitive...

**SharedIt Link: https://rdcu.be/bThEj** Bioethics has made a compelling case for the role of experience and empirical research in ethics. This may explain why the movement for empirical ethics has such a firm grounding in bioethics. However, the theoretical framework according to which empirical research contributes to ethics—and the specific role...

In this article, we discuss methodological opportunities related to using a team-based approach for iterative-inductive analysis of qualitative data involving detailed open coding of semistructured interviews and focus groups. Iterative-inductive methods generate rich thematic analyses useful in sociology, anthropology, public health, and many othe...

** VIEW FULL TEXT FOR FREE AT https://rdcu.be/bdSny ** Objective: Prognosis of Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy (HIE) remains challenging and uncertain. This paper investigates how physicians understand and address the ethical challenges of prognostic uncertainty in the case of neonatal HIE,contextualized within the social science literature. Study...

This chapter presents an outline of the history, politics, and lived experience of autism in Italy and Brazil, illuminating key similarities and differences. It focuses on the contemporary dilemmas around autism in these countries, particularly the historical developments of Psychiatric Reform (PR) in both countries, and how the post-reform epistem...

What are we talking about when we talk about autism? This commentary considers this question and the different ways autism is defined and addressed in Clarice Rios, Enrico Valtellina, and Roy Richard Grinker’s chapters of this volume. It discusses autism as a “concept,” an idea that is conceptualized in a variety of ways and holds a variety of mean...

Research ethics is often understood by researchers primarily through the regulatory framework reflected in the research ethics review process. This regulatory understanding does not encompass the range of ethical considerations in research, notably those associated with the relational and everyday aspects of human subject research. In order to supp...

In the nearly 20 years since Rabinow’s 1996 “Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality,” scholarly attention to biosociality and related concepts such as biological citizenship have expanded Foucault’s theories of biopolitics, updating them—as it were—for the 21st century. In this commentary, I explicate these “new biopolit...

Background: Recent evidence indicates a widening gap in fruit and vegetable (F/V) consumption between high- and low-income Americans. This gap is related, in part, to decreased access to food retailers that sell fresh F/V in low-income communities. Farmers' markets are identified as a strategy for improving F/V consumption by increasing access to...

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SharedIt Link: http://rdcu.be/mRS5 Many therapies, interventions, and programs seek to improve outcomes and quality of life for people diagnosed with autism spectrum conditions. This paper addresses Italian professionals' perspectives on a variety of such interventions, including TEACCH, ABA, Defeat Autism Now!, and Doman-Delacato. Drawing on part...

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Food and Drug Administration guidelines prohibit men who have sex with men (MSM) from donating blood to prevent the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV/AIDS). Although the deferral criteria leave "sex" undefined, donor educational materials distributed before the health questionnaire often offer a definition. This study analyzes educati...

The neurodiversity movement takes an identity politics approach to autism spectrum disorders, proposing autism spectrum disorders as a positive "neuro-variation" to be approached only with interventions that assist individuals without changing them. This article explicates the concept of neurodiversity and places it within the context of autism spe...