User:Disabilitynorm

My work has focused on understanding complex systems as tools for the realization of disability civil rights and the change from a civil rights frame to a social justice frame. I began this work in the year after I returned from Vietnam (1969), and initially focused on working with children and adults who had suffered brain damage. My initial frame was (thus) neuropsychology, primarily as it developed historically in the Soviet Union. In America, neuropsychology was and largely is a tool of research. In the Soviet Union, which had 5 million brain-injured survivors of World War II and a largely destroyed health, higher learning and rehabilitation infrastructure, neuropsychology was a deeply necessary tool of recovery.

I read the works of Vygotsky and Luria in neuropsychology and expanded from there. I read Piaget, and other developmental theorists, since neuropsychology is a developmental realm of knowledge. I learned about the extraordinarily broad scope of rehabilitation techniques not especially tied to theory. I worked with many children and adults with brain injury and tried my best to tie all this together.

In the mid '70s, a friend who was studying Urban Planning gave me a copy of "Notes on the Synthesis of Form", by Christopher Alexander. It was my first introduction to they system view of creating change through design. I soon found General Systems Theory and the astounding scope and variety of thinking that has developed over the last half-century, leading to the models of complex adaptive systems theory in the last decade or two.