What’s Hot at What Sorts

Here in the belly of the What Sorts beast we have access to tricksy tools that let us see what posts people read, link to, and comment on. Being the liberal-minded people we are, we thought we’d let you in on some. Here’s a list of ten of our earlier posts from ten different authors. Whether you’re new to the blog and want to know what we’re about, or if you’re just and old-timer who’s as curious as we are about what sorts of things people like to read, we thought you’d find this interesting.

Excluded: Sorry, it’s not your right

Recently there’s been one story after the next in the news about an autistic child, and about special needs children, being removed (physically, in some cases) from public spaces: A Minnesota church, more than one airplane, a kindergarten classroom. I’ve followed many of these cases on my autism weblog and the discussions that have emerged have often gotten long, and been more than heated—-they’ve been full of vitriol, hostility and disgust that parents of disabled children have so little regard for others’ safety and are, indeed, so seemingly careless of the needs of others.

Parents of disabled children do care very much; indeed they may be the most sensitive of all to how strangers feel when a child “misbehaves” in public. But being parents of kids who often don’t get understood, we have to take care—to advocate—for our kids. Experience has shown me that, at the end of the day, if my husband Jim and I don’t stand up for Charlie, people just walk by. In May, I wrote a post entitled Excluded: On Keeping the Faith about the daily advocacy a parent of a disabled child, and one’s disabled child, find themselves performing everyone we step into a public place and I’m reposting it here.

What sorts of Europeans?

July 2008. The European commission has published the results of its latest Eurobarometer study of discrimination in European countries. The study is intended to measure perceived discrimination based on age, disability, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation  in each of the member countries. It also allows comparison with a previous round of the survey two years earlier. The results paint a mixed picture. On the positive side, most questions suggested an overall decrease in bias and discrimination. On the negative side, the results suggested that discrimination remains a widespread problem throughout most of Europe.

Where is our thinking about people thinking located?

Over at The Situationist there is a recent post on the work of Rebecca Saxe , a cognitive neuroscientist at MIT, on the brain localization of thought about the minds of others, and about moral reasoning that involves the attribution of mental states to others. They basically cut and paste an article on Saxe from the MIT News office, but there’s much in this of potential interest to What Sorters (perhaps including the pattern of female descent in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences) here. I heard Saxe give a mighty fine talk (on prosody and listeners’ representations) at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology annual meeting last week in the City of Brotherly Love. A little more on the work itself on folk attributions, its location, and where it seems to be heading vis-a-vis work on autism and moral cognition, two current hot topics at the interface of philosophy and psychology.