ABOUT
Welcome to CASY! Join us to explore, define, generate, record and preserve autistic culture.
The CASY program (originally Community Autism Socials) was started in 2014 by Dr Roger Jou of the Yale Child Study Center. Originally a way for families to meet in person in the New Haven, Connecticut area, the program was soon embraced by the autistic community and became a hub of autistic culture.
During the pandemic, CASY went to an exclusively online format. This proved a great service to autistic culture, as the group found natural resonance through a mode of participation that spoke to their needs and style of interaction, and autistic people took advantage of ways to connect with one another and celebrate their way of being as the community grew from a local project to one accessible to autistic people anywhere in the world.
An “ethnography” is an organic practice and interactive framework for learning about the ways that people and their groups perceive the world, seeking to understand their basic structures, guidelines, values, unique expressions in art, music, writing, communicating, organizing themselves, and how they relate to the living world around them. What we learned in our first two years of the ethnography was that autistic people do indeed have a culture, a shared way of being. The discoveries of the ethnography have been profound, and shift basic assumptions about what autism is, and has far reaching implications for the support and thriving of autistic people and the expansive culture that we share on a global level.
In April of 2024, Dr. Jou, with the support of Dr. Prince- Hughes, renamed and rebranded the program. “CASY” now stands for Cultural Autism Studies at Yale. But those of us close to the program affectionately refer to is as CASY (KAY-see).
WHAT WE DO
Since CASY’s expansion in 2024, the program has exploded as autistic people who have long known that we are part of what has been a hidden culture up until recently have enthusiastically joined to create their own projects in the area of autistic culture.
Many autistic people and allies who had come to the ethnography project to speak about their lives and areas of interest have come on board the cultural autism studies program to design and facilitate their own regular sessions in the comprehensive areas of education, mental health, our living environments (both personal and global), aging, housing, autistic relationships (with other persons, animals, and special interests), literature and the arts, technology, and other cultural areas.
We are pleased to have representatives from many cultures and geographic locations, including the United States, Mexico, Canada, Taiwan, New Zealand, Ghana, Senegal, India, Brazil, and several European nations including Italy, Belgium, and Portugal. We are proud to incorporate many voices literally, through diverse language, and also BIPOC and non-speaking autistic people. Our participants come from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds.
WHAT IS AUTISTIC CULTURE?
Because autistic culture is a unique phenomenon, it is constantly in the process of exploring itself, defining itself, and generating itself. Unlike holistic (non-autistic) culture, it is deeply relational. For many autistic people there is no strict boundary between self and environment, or self and other. We tend not to see things in hierarchies, but in relational ways that are in constant flux. “Neuro-Holographic” is an emergent idea that our group has embraced. Neuro-Holographic, as a concept here, refers to the idea that every small bit of energy and information, whether an atom or the universe, reflects every other part of itself in a seamless and meaningful way.
This has led to the awareness that, despite common misconceptions, we are very much empathetically connected to the things around us. Because our sensing mechanisms are super sensitive and often synesthetic (cross-sensing — for example, tasting colors or seeing sound) we often feel a part of the things around us. We don’t tend to see in hierarchies, but rather in “holograms,” as described. Always looking for connecting patterns in an overwhelming ocean of sensory, emotional, and energetic information, our relational culture focuses on how things go together and function. Because of these innate talents, insights, and a tendency toward invention, out of the box thinking, and an enthusiasm for combining patterns, autistic/Neuro-Holographic people have been responsible for many important developments in the larger cultures in which they find themselves. Being extraordinarily sensitive and seeing things in new ways is foundational to autistic culture.
How we participate and engage in our culture takes many forms. Though patterns of turn taking, ideas about what is relevant in conversation, and unique individual ways of experiencing the world, one exciting thing that we have discovered is that autistic people often have a desire to connect with one another. That we find it easier, oftentimes, to communicate with each other despite these realities underscores a basic understanding of each other. The ways that we solve problems together, share insights about patterns, relate what’s inspiring to us and the ideas that we have are all resonant with a our “protoculture.”
Protoculture in this sense is not primitive or simple; rather, it rests on certain unspoken ways of being that are expanded and built upon, communicated and shared in a uniquely relational way. All social animals share levels of protoculture. It is a basic set of resonant social tools. Individual cultures build upon these to become beautiful expressions of culture in flower.
In modern life, embedded within larger neuronormative cultures, autistic people have not had much chance to explore a shared culture. Now, however, technology has afforded us completely new ways to engage in those explorations together, and the exciting thing is that autistic culture, as its own thing, is just now beginning to reach a kind of critical mass and take form. CASY is an important nexus as we all participate in our explorations, definitions, generatings, recording and sharing of this flowering bud.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
How do I participate in the CASY program?
There are many ways to participate. We have a calendar that details the sessions, workshops, hang outs, and various groups coming up. If you wish to join any of these, feel free to join our notification list so that we can send you a secure link to participate online. We also have a resource page that is constantly updated, and we urge people to share with us new or interesting resources that can help our community. You are invited to join our Facebook page where we have ongoing announcements and discussions about various cultural topics. We also include an area where people can share cultural material such as writing, visual art, music, and scholarship and we hope that that will act as a kind of repository for many examples of autistic culture.
Who can participate?
CASY is open to all autistic /Neuro-Holographic people, whether officially or self-identified. We also welcome allies with the understanding that autistic voices are core. We have very few places in the world where we can enjoy self-determination and a direct engagement with our culture. Learning and questioning are always welcome, but we ask that our sovereignty as a living body, as a culture, is respected. This is an autism-positive space that embraces autism as a way of being and not a disorder, a dysfunction, or something to cure or control.
Who are CASY’s active participants?
Well we consider the entirety of the autistic population active participants in building and recognizing autistic culture, we have a core group of people who routinely engage in helping to run the program by offering sessions, building our infrastructure, and keeping things running smoothly. Check out our participants page to read more about the great rainbow of regular contributors!
CASY is a volunteer-run, autism-positive, inclusive and egalitarian organization by and for autistic/neuroholographic people and neuro-kin. We are proud to function as a “holographic” entity comprised of people from all cultures, geographic areas, socioeconomic circumstances, educational levels, spiritual traditions, genders and identities, speaking and non-speaking.We welcome the support of our autism-positive allies. To keep all offerings free and radically accessible, all talks, workshops, sessions, support groups, etc. are generously donated by our participants and partners. Thank you