One of our post grad students and autistic self advocate, George Watts is trying to contact other autistic adults in Kent to ask if they would be interested in contributing their photos to a film about happiness, to raise awareness of the non-tragic aspects of autism. If you know of anyone who might be interested, please ask them to get in touch with her at gnw3@kent.ac.uk
Information:
I am an autistic student at the University of Kent, Canterbury. For World Autism Awareness Week this year I am hoping to make a short film about autistic adults in Kent. This will be in the form of a slideshow using photos sent to me by people like yourself.
What do I want?
Quite simply I’d like you to think about a few things which make you happy and send me pictures of them.
Why?
Most people have heard of autism these days but there’s a still a lot of stereotyping, a lot of people don’t even realise that it’s not just kids who can be autistic. People often expect autistic adults to be like Rainman or Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory. I’d like to challenge people’s ideas of what autism is by showing them the wide variety of the things which make us happy. I have chosen to focus on pictures of happiness as there’s already so much out there on all the negative things but very few positive images of autism – I’d like to change that!
What now?
I would be so grateful if you could take the time to send me some photos of your life and the things which make you happy. By putting together pictures from lots of different autistic people being happy I hope to be able to show people that there’s much much more to our lives than meltdowns or achieving things ‘despite’ being autistic.
Please do email me if you have any questions or comments or would like to get involved in making the film and do feel free to forward this to other autistic adults in the Kent area.
Thanks for taking the time to read this!
George Watts
With support from the Disability Team at University of Kent Student Support and Wellbeing
Please note that by contributing your photos to this project you confirm that you have full copyright over the images, consent to their use within this film and understand that we cannot control how the images are used once they are in the public domain.