Lydia Brown

Student activism

While an undergraduate student at Georgetown University from 2011 until graduating in 2015, Brown was also a student organizer and advocate for disabled students on campus. Brown served as the first-ever Undersecretary of Disability Affairs for the Georgetown University Student Association, wrote and disseminated a citywide guide to resources for students with disabilities, designed a proposal for a Disability Cultural Center on campus, surveyed student government candidates on disability issues, organized a Twitter chat by Georgetown students with disabilities, and hosted and organized a Lecture & Performance Series on Disability Justice that featured talks with disability activists, scholars, and cultural workers including Karen Nakamura, Margaret Price, Leroy F. Moore Jr., Kassiane Sibley, Stephanie Kerschbaum, and Shain M. Neumeier.

Career

Since graduating from Georgetown, Brown is now a Public Interest Law Scholar at Northeastern University School of Law. In Massachusetts, Brown first wrote and introduced legislation in 2010 on autism and developmental disabilities training for law enforcement, including corrections officers, and has continued to lobby for passage of that bill.

Brown worked as a policy analyst for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a national disability rights organization led by and for autistic people until 2015, and co-founded the Washington Metro Disabled Students Collective. Brown is also a former Patricia Morrissey Disability Policy Fellow at the Institute for Educational Leadership.

In 2011, Brown wrote a petition demanding school district-wide policy changes in Mercer County, Kentucky after viewing local news coverage of an incident in which Christopher Baker, a nine year old autistic student, was punished by being placed inside a large bag. The petition gained over 200,000 signatures and news coverage by the Associated Press and The Guardian.

In 2013, Brown co-organized a protest outside the Food and Drug Administration White Oak Campus in Maryland against the Judge Rotenberg Center, which is known for its use of painful aversives as a form of behavioral modification on people with developmental disabilities, including many autistic people. Later, in 2014, Brown testified against the Judge Rotenberg Center's use of electric shock aversives at a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel hearing. Prior to the hearing, Brown submitted lengthy written testimony on behalf of TASH New England arguing that electric shock aversive devices should be banned as an ineffective and dangerous form of treatment. Brown maintains a living archive of documents and other resources related to the JRC on their website.

The Washington Peace Center selected Brown as the recipient of its 2014 Empowering the Future Youth Activist Award for their work with the Washington Metro Disabled Students Collective and the Autistic Self Advocacy Network.

In 2015, Brown was named a Top Thinker Under 30 in the Social Sciences by Pacific Standard and included on Mic's inaugural list of "the next generation of impactful leaders, cultural influencers, and breakthrough innovators." Brown has lectured on neurodiversity; connections between trans, queer, and disability experiences; racial justice and the disability rights movement; and intersectionality at numerous colleges and universities, including Yale University, Bellevue College, University of Virginia, Grinnell College, College of William & Mary, and Vanderbilt University as part of the Inclusive Astronomy Conference. In 2015, Brown gave the keynote speech at the Students of Color Conference held in Yakima, Washington, and in 2016, Brown gave the keynote speech at the Queer I Am Leadership Symposium held at South Puget Sound Community College.

Alongside E. Ashkenazy and Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, Brown is the lead editor of All the Weight of Our Dreams, a new anthology of art and writing entirely by autistic people of color to be published by the Autism Women's Network in April 2016.

Selected works