Mitzi Waltz

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam | VU · Athena Institute

Background: The number of autistic individuals attending university and entering the workforce is growing, but there is a persistent employment gap. Higher education careers services offer students help to secure employment post-graduation. This research sought to identify barriers to and facilitators of success with regards to career advisors’ pra...

Although an unprecedented number of autistic students are entering higher education, research focusing on their sense of belonging is scarce. Autistic students’ sense of belonging can be jeopardized due to the students’ encounters with a network of social expectations, activities, responses and biased attitudes. Using a participatory approach, our...

Purpose: The study aimed to reveal barriers and their coherences between discrimination and self-perceived employability which students and employees on the autism spectrum often face and need to overcome. These include discrimination based on disability, when applying for a job or retaining employment. This research located barriers in three diff...

Purpose This research aims to examine effective support strategies for facilitating employment of autistic students and graduates by answering the following research question: What constitutes effective employment support for autistic students and graduates? Design/methodology/approach Data were collected using the method of empathy-based stori...

Leprosy has long-term consequences related to impairment and stigma. This includes a major impact on mental health. This study aims to consolidate current evidence regarding the mental health impact of leprosy on affected persons and their family members. In addition, determinants influencing mental health outcomes among leprosy-affected persons an...

Despite the steps taken to improve support in universities, many students and graduates with autism face a substantial employment gap when completing university as compared to any other student group with disabilities. The literature shows that often students with autism do not have appropriate support to prepare them for entering the workforce. Th...

Diversity is a current buzzword in politics, but in the EU, people with disabilities are not achieving the gains made by women and ethnic minorities. This research examined barriers and facilitating factors through a literature review and interviews with politicians and political activists in five European countries. Six categories of barriers and...

This contribution focuses on autistic people’s transition from education into work, and the substantial employment gap that exists. Many young autistic people successfully complete their education, yet regularly fail to secure or retain employment afterwards. Reasons are multi-fold: ineffective careers advice, poor employability skills, biased rec...

This is a letter to the editor (Larry Arnold) at Autonomy, the Critical Journal of Interdisciplinary Autism Studies. It respond's to a well known article by Damian Milton, I and Mitzi Waltz set out the case for the strength of autistic perspectives and how they can be included in autism research. The author's thank Dinah Murray for her comments dur...

Despite an elaborated framework on reasonable accommodations in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD), persons with mental disabilities continue to face significant limitations to employment in East Africa. The aim of our study is to explore legal provisions related to reasonable accommodations in the employment-rel...

When designing and implementing evidence-based programs for children with an autism spectrum disorder, the intervention priorities of parents are important criteria. Although studies in developed countries have explored parents’ intervention priorities, there is a paucity of this kind of research in developing countries. This research explores the...

In 2016, the Netherlands ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, one of the last developed nations to do so. In this article, we explore how equal access to food provides a lens through which barriers to implementing a rights-based approach to disability equality can be examined in countries that are historically resi...

Het doel van het VN Verdrag voor de Rechten van Mensen met een Beperking is een inclusieve samenleving. Geen fysieke, wettelijke en sociale barrières meer voor mensen met een beperking. Wordt het een wereld van verschil? ‘Ja, uiteindelijk wel’, zeggen (ervarings)deskundigen.

Universal Design, UD in learning, Inclusivity, Training, Stigma Prevention, Job opportunities and Talent development

In the Netherlands, as in many other countries, fear of disability is evident on many levels. From potent terms of abuse and exasperation (kankerwijf, doe normaal) to persistent segregation in schools, workplaces and public spaces, this fear is audible and visible. Eugenic discourses regarding bodies and minds labelled as “disabled” pervade the m...

This study focused on parent-initiated supported living schemes in the South of the Netherlands and the ability of these living schemes to enhance participation, choice, autonomy and selfadvocacy for people with intellectual or developmental disabilities through personalized planning, support and care. Based on in-depth interviews with tenants, par...

Abstract: The construction of normalcy and disability in (special) education One of the most important ways that normalcy and disability have been constructed through cultural practices has occurred within the (special) education system. Compulsory education was often established due to concerns that “normal” children faced developmental dangers w...

This article presents the results of participatory research into the roles and practices of autistic self-advocates in the Netherlands, and the outcomes of their activities. The article discusses the history of Dutch autism self-advocacy, situating it within the history and practices of self-advocacy internationally and the socio-cultural context o...

“Study says cost of autism more than cancer, strokes or heart disease” [1]. This was one of many “screamer” headlines announcing new research on the cost to the UK and US economies of lifespan care for people with autism spectrum conditions [2]. Lost in media examinations [3, 4] of these 2014 cost estimates—which can be misleading, since only a sma...

Full text available from: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YWaEV4DVKc8mUJChbDBD/full

Autism: A Social and Medical History contextualizes autism as a socio cultural phenomenon, and examines the often troubling effects of representations and social trends. Exploring the individuals and events in the history of this condition, Waltz blends research and personal perspectives to examine social narratives of normalcy, disability and diff...

Ralph Sedgwick1 lay in the bed, where he was tucked tightly in beneath a crisp white sheet to keep him from wandering. He wiggled his fingers between his eyes and the light that came streaming in through the large window at the end of the hospital ward. The year was 1877, the height of the Victorian era and a time when medical knowledge was expandi...

In 1990, Bruno Bettelheim committed suicide. Although he had not been an active practitioner in the autism field for many years, it seemed as though this event finally gave critics a chance to step out from his shadow. What followed was more than the reappraisal of a life’s work that usually follows the death of a prominent person: it was a public...

By the Victorian era, the population of England had swollen rapidly. Throughout most of the Western world, there was a massive migration from rural areas into cities like London, and even in the countryside industrialisation was changing the nature of everyday life through mechanised agriculture. For industrialists and the educated few, these extra...

As the 1970s moved forward, many adults like Jimmy Jones remained on locked wards, but far fewer children were being shunted into long-stay institutions. In any case, there had always been some families who resisted the advice to institutionalise. For example, the Edge family, from a small coastal village in England, struggled to keep their son Mic...

For decades the ideas of Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990) and others from a primarily Freudian psychotherapy background held sway in the field, with devastating results for affected children and their families. This chapter will explain the context within which such notions gained widespread acceptance, and set the stage for the character of the reacti...

In the men’s ward at Ely Hospital in the mid-1960s, Jimmy Jones1 was just one of around 60 adults living on a packed ward, which was one of six in the large subnormality hospital outside Cardiff in Wales. He had lived at Ely from the age of four, having been admitted in 1935. In the ward’s sleeping room, beds with their matching white sheets and co...

For many years, practitioners working with children seen to have behavioural, psychological, or developmental problems had little guidance. Textbooks referred to children only in relation to the childhood experiences of adult patients, and child psychology and psychiatry did not exist as recognised specialties. The few clinicians who did see this p...

The stories of Ralph and Ida neatly bisect the social and medical history of autism. Before the ‘Age of Enlightenment,’ a period that is usually held to run from the last two decades of the seventeenth century through the eighteenth century, the symptoms that we now associate with autism were viewed largely through the lenses of folklore and religi...

This article addresses the knowledge and understanding needed by teachers working with children on the autism spectrum. Effective practice depends largely on understanding of autism and of the individual child rather than on specialist skills. This understanding should include the triad of impairments, sensory perceptual issues, and cognitive diffe...

This research explores awareness of issues and debates concerning images and narratives about disability amongst autism charity brand-management professionals and their counterparts in the creative industries. These include the role of charities in service provision, the social model of disability, and disability stigma. It describes and analyses p...

Autism is a lifelong developmental condition that emerges in early childhood. Individual profiles and severity differ greatly, so clinicians talk about an autism spectrum representing a range of difficulties and differences. When it comes to diagnostic delay and misdiagnosis among children from ethnic minorities, the issues can be cultural or syste...

There are many ways to counter the myth of the autism epidemic. In this well-researched volume, the authors have chosen one that will provoke much discussion and debate in the field: linking the rise in autism's profile to changing concepts and practices around intellectual disability. Marshalling contemporary literature and more recent statistical...

In this article we examine the relatively new use of disability as a marketing device in pop music. Our analysis makes specific reference to how the career of Ian Curtis and Joy Division has become overshadowed by his epilepsy, depression and subsequent suicide, with comparison between early press and promotional materials from 1979–1980 and more r...

‘New Age’ belief systems are relatively common, including amongst adherents of traditional religions. This article examines common New Age ideas about autism spectrum disorders. These beliefs are varied, but may include notions of karma, reincarnation, spirit or extraterrestrial possession, and telepathy, as well as recourse to specific types of th...

The aims of this programme on the autism spectrum are to: • improve outcomes for pupils on the autism spectrum • increase knowledge and understanding among professionals about the autism spectrum • share good practice so that professionals in mainstream schools can make adjustments to their policies, practices, procedures and curriculum that will e...

Inclusion Development Programme for staff working in mainstream early years settings with children on the autism spectrum.

This discussion interrogates the continuing impact of the pervasive and persistent usage of debilitating metaphors perpetuating 'historical' superstitions, myths and beliefs surrounding disability. This article examines the real-life consequences of the power exercised through the deployment of derogatory metaphors and their very real effects on ca...

Increasingly, parents and practitioners are using the Internet to access information and it is important that this is well informed, up to date and easy to find. This paper explores the content and navigability of a sample of local authority websites in England in relation to information provided on the autism spectrum. The topics likely to be of i...

To look for the answers of ‘What is the relationship between ethics and quality in education research?’, this article explores factors that bind the two too tightly together for extrication, including representation of subject and researcher mindsets, the setting of research agendas, research design and funding. Using research in autism as a partic...

This paper explores the factors that are likely to contribute to effective INSET training on ASD within mainstream secondary school. The authors compare the experiences of INSET in two different schools within the same local authority. Much training is offered to school staff and it is important for providers to consider how best this is done and t...

A study of the alternative media that can be found outside the mainstream mass media.

Autistic spectrum disorders have been described, defined and differentiated from other neurological conditions primarily on the basis of case studies. A small group of highly influential case studies forms a core narrative of autism, which is challenged by other narratives. In this research, analytical techniques from cultural studies are used to u...

This article examines the existence, description, perception, treatment, and outcome of symptoms consistent with autistic disorder in nineteenth-century London, England, based on case histories from the notes of Dr William Howship Dickinson at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. Three cases meeting the DSM-IV criteria for autistic disorder a...

st century paper on autism with a quote from Bruno Bettelheim feels like a heretical act. After all, Bettelheim's theories about this neurological condition have long since been discredited, along with the veracity of his case studies and accounts.2 But as this work concerns itself with the metaphors of autism, returning to a writer whose metaphors...