Ep. 93 - Learn about The Cog Neurodiversity Center

Did you know CSUSB has a neurodiversity space called The Cog? In Ep. 93 of the CSUSB Advising Podcast, Matt Markin chats with Dr. J. Chad Sweeney about what benefits The Cog offers to students, what neurodiversity is, and how to support and contribute to this innovative space!

Check out The Cognitive Collective website! For questions, contact Dr. Sweeney at chadsw@csusb.edu. Stop by The Cog in University Hall, Rm 401.02!

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Transcript

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Matt Markin  
Hello and welcome back to the CSUSB Advising Podcast. This is Matt Markin from the ASUA Academic Advising office. And on today's episode, we're learning more about an innovative neurodiversity space on the San Bernardino campus called The Cog, a space for neuro connection, neuroharmony, and neurodiversity. And to learn more about this, let's welcome to the podcast. Our special guest, Dr. Chad Sweeney. Dr Sweeney, welcome.

Dr. Chad Sweeney  
Thank you, Matt. I'm so glad you reached out to us to talk about this, something I love very much, and I'm very excited about. So I really appreciate this.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, I appreciate you being here. I'm interested to learn a lot more about this and share this with our students. So before we jump into that, let's get to learn a little bit more about you. What's been your path in higher ed and being at Cal State San Bernardino?

Dr. Chad Sweeney  
Well, I've been a teacher for a long, long time. So I taught in San Francisco for 14 years, and in bilingual classrooms, largely Spanish and English and sometimes even Mandarin and Arabic. You know, I had to use as much language as I could. I worked with newly arrived teenagers who have come from other countries, the United States, and I taught poetry Creative Writing workshops for writers corps in the inner city in San Francisco, and housing projects as well, and some work with incarcerated youth. And then I decided to go get a PhD and become a university professor. And so after doing that in Michigan, I've come back to Cal State San Bernardino. I got my PhD at Western Michigan University, which has a PhD, and I did post colonial studies, Native American Lit and poetry, creative writing, especially contemporary poetry. So I've been teaching Cal State for 13 years here in creative writing in the English department, and now, and I've been increasingly doing more and more with Disability Studies. I am autistic myself. So my career, all of my writing, I've actually published 10 books, six books of poetry, two books of translation and two edited works. And my writing has always been about being autistic in a way, in different ways. So each each book is, one is, is about masking and taking on different personalities, trying to find a personality that works. One book is entirely written in Spanish, because when I lived in South America and spoke Spanish, I discovered that through Spanish, I could express myself. Spanish allowed me to come closer to how I felt as a person. One thing with autism is sometimes it's hard to find the personality that suits you. It's we do masking. We do a lot of trying to fit in, trying to make sense of being a person in the world. And you know, what does our face do? What our eyes do? What's our voice do? This stuff is hard for us. Sounds strange, but, I mean, it really is pretty interesting. And so my books are all about trying to find who I am and the self and the multiple selves. And then here at Cal State San Bernardino, now I'm a faculty fellow for disabilities. It's called the faculty inclusion fellow for disabilities, accommodation and difference, and I direct the neurodiversity center. This year, The Cog, the cognitive collective, and I have a number of interns working with me in The Cog. And so my journey has been intellectual but also personal, understanding myself and learning how to understand more and more people in the widest possible way and with the widest possible Welcome. I'm also Buddhist. I spent, I spent a year in Asia meditating in temples a lot of the time, and traveling in Tibet on horseback and things like that. I've really spent a lot of time with monks in temples and tried to understand a way to love more broadly and more perfectly, I guess, finding tolerance and kindness and practicing that on a daily basis. So all of that converges in teaching. Teaching is really an art of love and compassion, I think, and really a beautiful practice. So hopefully, you know, I've, I've been able to reach students in a positive way for these 30 years, and I'm trying to make myself better all the time as I do it. That's, that's the goal.

Matt Markin  
And you know, you're mentioning a lot of the work that you've done in the work and teaching you've done in San Francisco, but you're also a product of the Cal State system as well, because you earned your MFA at San Francisco State University?

Dr. Chad Sweeney  
I did. I earned an MFA at San Francisco State and that's, that's a good point, you know, and my BA was at University of Oklahoma. Every university has been a state university, or, you know, government subsidized university, so the population. Are diverse. The populations are real. We are the universities of the people, the people who go to our universities, live near, live within 50 miles and come and I really believe in this version of a university, which is of the people, for the people, by the people. And I really hope that we study in universities and then stay and do things here that we build and create and have our have our lives here. So I believe in the power of universities to do that. San Francisco State was fantastic for me, and I think I really learned how to be an activist there. We did. We went to so many marches in San Francisco. We We marched all the time for immigrant rights, queer rights, and it felt really good to be a part of that. And I learned to voice. My teaching was also very much related to this. I learned to voice, we learned to voice what needed to be said in social justice and also personal development and growth, and that place where personal growth comes in contact with social justice, and that's really a very rich place for art and growth and personal growth to take place. It's all related.

Matt Markin  
100% and yeah, just like you're mentioned with state university is like, you know, you're a product of the state university, and then just to be able to learn and grow from there, but also kind of have that full circle moment and be able to give back to the community, I think is fantastic. And you were mentioning overseeing The Cog. So let's talk about that. What is The Cog?

Dr. Chad Sweeney  
Oh, my God. Well, the cog is one of the few in America. Neuro diversity centers and most universities don't even have one yet. So this is the first one in the Cal State Systems, Berkeley doesn't have one yet. There are very few universities even have this. And this is a wonderful thing. So The Cog is a neurodiversity center, and it was a 10 year dream that Jess Nerren put together in a single year. So we were talking about this last year, and over the summer and and then all of a sudden, things started moving. And Jess Nerren was the faculty fellow last year in the position I'm doing now. And she managed to get a space, put it together, gather interns and create a kind of a hub, the beginning frameworks for The Cog. And so it's developing really well already, and this year will be the second year The Cog is a neurodiversity center. It's a place for welcome, for community, for belonging. It's a place of shelter. It's a place of sensory shelter. If you're on the autistic, autistic spectrum, or have any number of sometimes we think of it as disability. Sometimes we think of it as just a difference, anxiety, OCD, it's a place of shelter. It's a place to come and be in retreat, in the quiet, dark. It's a place to stem stemming people with autism will stem in different ways, calming ourselves, rocking, humming, moaning, flapping hands, clicking, our fingers, blinking. There are a number of things we do to calm you'll see me rocking a lot. I do a lot of rocking. So The Cog is a place to be. For one thing, it's also a place of self advocacy. So the interns who work in the cog and for the cog are also doing writing. They're making films, doing programming. So we're going to have, in the coming year, we have a dating workshop, kind of a sexual relationship dating communication workshop that's being taught by a sociology professor named Jamie O'Quinn, and Dr. O'Quinn will be and we're going to reach out with other areas of the of the university to do this sort of thing. So The Cog we last year, there were film screenings, there was a book discussion hosted by librarian the Dean of Libraries, about an autistic character. So The Cog is also a library we're building. If you think about this, the importance of something like, let's say, Black History Month, where we as a nation, learn and look into brilliant leaders of history, moments of history, great writers, great thinkers, and build this lineage of being black, of blackness and black history. Well, in the disability space, we barely have that. We don't know who our leaders are. We don't know who are, who are people. We don't know who are the Autistics. It's so new this as a field that we don't have that history yet. So this library is trying to build that history, that that awareness and witness who are our people. Where are the where are the great moments of. Of change in politics or change in law, we need to know those dates. We need to know those people. How do we think? How do we talk about ourselves? And so we're growing a library, and there's an Amazon wish list for anyone who would like to help us buy another book, where we're building the books, and we come in and read, and a bunch of my own development has already occurred by coming into the cog and reading. So I've really been doing this myself, and it's all of these things. So The Cog is a space, but it's also a virtual space. It's more than a space. We will have gaming. We will reach out across the campus from this space. We will reach out across the world from this space, because we're also going to have a blog, which will be a place to publish student writing, which is sometimes research, sometimes it's personal poetry or memoir. Sometimes it might be films about what it feels like to be me, if I'm bipolar or borderline personality, or if I have OCD, or if I am autistic, What's that feel like? What's it look like? We can create films that reach out to the world. And so The Cog is a place of connection. It's really a hub of connection. It's all of these things, and it's growing each year by what students are interested in doing, the student interns and the people who come and join us, we will be growing ourselves based on the interests. So it's quite flexible. It's a place of self advocacy. It's a place where we learn to talk about ourselves, advocate for ourselves, advocate for policy changes, and connect and share and protect one another, and it's also a place of integration. It's not a segregated space. It's not a space for only neurotypicals, nor atypicals to be separate. It's a place for the range of neuro possibility, the neuro spectrum, and which includes neurotypicals. It includes people who are so called normal, although the more we look into it, the more we find that there is no normal, that there is really quite a range of difference. And thinking of it along the idea of neuro diversity, we will find a wonderful new way to access humanity and to think about the range of what humanity really means. So The Cog is doing all these things. It's, you know, it's hard it's hard to pin it down, but it's, it's a space for safety, growth, change, advocacy, and a place to activate innate forces in each of us. 

Matt Markin  
Seems like a lot that that's going on, and just to kind of hear that, you know, this is with 10 years in the making.

Dr. Chad Sweeney  
Maybe I said that a little wrong. It we thought it would take 10 years, but okay, awesome that it's been a dream. It's been a dream for a few years, but all of a sudden I was thinking, Well, if this happens within 10 years, that'll be good. Let's dream it into action and then, and then in this in the first year Jess Nerren at the genius that she is. She's a communications professor, and her son is autistic, and she grew up advocate. She advocated for him as he was growing up through the K through 12 years, and she had to work so hard to create safe spaces for him within education that she learned and really became an incredible disabilities advocate. So she's a special person, and she brought all her force to bear in creating the cog just in one year. And so this is year two. We'll see if we can maintain some of that great stuff, if we can build some new programming in and then pass it, I'll pass it on next year to someone else, probably maybe Jess coming back. We're not sure.

Matt Markin  
Throughout already with with this, we've we've mentioned neurodiversity as a term for those that may not know, like, how would you define that or describe that?

Dr. Chad Sweeney  
Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Well, maybe, maybe sort of by example. So neuro diversity, the neuro typical is what we would think of as normal, you know, but I'm going to come back and challenge that notion anyway, but, but neuro diversity would include things like autism and ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, things like OCD, Things like dyslexia is neuro diversity, also things like bipolar disorder. Sometimes it's disorder, but really it's just difference. It's difference. We resist the idea that the medical model of disability says that we are the problem. The social model disability says the organization of social institutions creates otherness. That creates the problem that's where we find ourselves as other an autistic person is, can be wonderfully happy, highly functional, incredibly valuable as it as as as a person you know and love life, but it's, it's in the norms of society that we struggle and where we find ourselves pushed to the edge, bullied, ostracized, made fun of, feared, even people fear us. There are all kinds of weird ways that neurotypicals project onto the neurodiversity group their own fears about difference, and so in some ways, we aren't a disability. We are a social construct. We are socially othered. It's really interesting. Neurodiversity can include other forms of neuro difference. If you just think about all the ways that a brain can be different, neurodiversity expresses those differences, and the the percentages of us are very high. There we are many. We aren't we aren't one out of 1000 even 20 years ago, in the early 2000s The belief was that about two or three autistic people exist out of every 1000, and now the numbers are up to 5% or 20% I mean, really, it's incredible. Some of us have sensory integration disorder or sensory processing disorder. That's a neuro difference. And about 20% of all people have sensory defensiveness. That means lights too bright, sound is too loud, and the normative settings for lighting and sound will, will, will torture us eventually we can, we can manage it a little while, but as the day goes on, we become tired and more and more tired and sometimes agitated defensive we want to escape. And so neurodiversity looks for a way to understand, validate, give, welcome, belonging to all of us, this sense of belonging, and so it's a place of healing for us. It's also a way to understand ourselves. So neuro diversity, if that makes sense, it also includes neuro typical. So we are not a segregated space. We want to belong. We want allies, and we want neurotypicals, which is neuro normals, to be around us as well. We want to be a part of this spectrum, this part of this rainbow of difference. Sometimes, when you think of it, people do think of autism as one of the maybe main ways to think of neuro diversity, but really there are several. And so in a given classroom, there's a guarantee there are a few people who are neuro diverse in every classroom, and the professor may not really understand that, or may not be accommodating to that difference, or teaching in a way that makes us feel welcome, creating spaces of welcome for us. And so we're hoping to understand ourselves and also to advocate and bridge between our population of neuro diversity and and everyone else you know in welcome, not in not in separateness, but in welcome and togetherness and kind of integration. So if you think about the history of difference, we can think about the history of racism as being either segregated or assimilated, and both are racist pressures. Some racists want to segregate out a different culture, they say, No, stay out, blocking the border entirely. Get out. Do not come. That's segregation. Assimilation is you can come as long as you look like us. You can come as long as you speak our language. So assimilationist racism looks like forcing everyone to speak English and not Spanish, making fun of Arabic, trying to pressurize people to assimilate into a whiteness. That's assimilationist racism. Well, the same thing happens with disability, where growing up, we are segregated, often into special classrooms. We are hidden. We are separated out and hidden and or we are allowed to assimilate if we can, if we can act normal, we're allowed to be with the group. So it's either segregation or assimilation. And for autistics and people with ADHD and OCD, we spend a lot of our time hiding the fact that we're different. We learn to mask. It's called masking. How do you find a face, a physical body, a way of being where no one knows that we are different, because it's not safe to be different, so that's a kind of assimilationist pressure. Well, we can find a better way where people can be themselves, where someone with autism can stim in public if they need to rock and flap their hands, they'll just do that right in the middle of a cafe, right in the grocery store. Why would we need to hide that? Why would we run to the bathroom to stem why do we need to feel unsafe and have the manager approach us and kick us out for being ourselves and. So the new model would be where we are allowed to be ourselves in difference. That difference is permitted and tolerated and understood and welcomed and valued. And so neuro diversity, the neuro diversity space, hopes to create this ideal space of safety and togetherness. And then from there, we're going to try to spread that space outward. We're going to do events around campus and around the world that echo this space of togetherness and belonging, where I think we can find a really deep and beautiful harmony between the different neuro diversities, if that makes sense.

Matt Markin  
And even with everything that that you just said, Do you feel that people might still have misconceptions?

Dr. Chad Sweeney  
Oh, yeah, yeah. This is a really important question, a big part of the othering, the reason we are other, the reason we're pushed out, or, you know, made fun of, pushed aside, is is the belief and this is kind of fear based projection about how we are different. If we are struggle with politeness. Politeness theory says that if someone is not polite, that means they are out to destroy you. So if you're polite, you're showing you value someone's humanness, you respect them and you're not going to hurt them. If you are impolite, you might hurt them in some way, you might undermine them. So if a person is struggles with politeness, they are very quickly pushed aside, because the assumption is they are intending to harm whereas if it's a disability, they're not intending to harm, they're having they have a disability, they do not have that capacity to recognize situations of politeness. And that's a real struggle for some of us. We also, I think autism. Let me think of autism as an example. We can be represented as strange geniuses who are made fun of, ostracized, punished, until, until our genius becomes useful, and in that moment, we are redeemed. This is kind of the Rain Man theory, or Monk, is a character who has autism, who is a detective. He's not allowed to be on the police force. He's made fun of every episode. They make fun of him. They make fun of him. They make fun of him. Even though he's a genius and solves the case, they still make fun of him, push him out, will not let him be on the police force, but his genius redeems him. So I'd like to say that we don't need to be geniuses, to be accepted an autistic person. There are, there are some geniuses among us, but mostly we're just normal people. We're just we want to belong. We want to feel welcome, and we aren't likely to solve the nuclear nuclear reactor code in the last second in order to save civilization, and therefore you should accept us for that reason. So films like to like to hyper excite this issue and make us ostracize. It's okay to ostracize us as long until the moment where we redeem ourselves by revealing our brilliance. So that that model you can see is really a problem. It implies that a person doesn't belong until they have an incredible value, not just an ordinary value, but an incredible value. The fact is, autistics are very good employees. We do have deep focus. We can work a long time on a single thing. We can work 12 hours in a row. We can do that. We do have that tendency, but we tend to be as intelligent as anyone else. We're just a little different in our behavior. And so we have some standout geniuses who and we do have some superpowers. For some reason, I can learn language quickly. I can play chess pretty well. I can do certain things. I can solve puzzles and problem, you know, and so I do have some interesting abilities, but that's not what makes me a human or makes me valuable. So one misconception is, is that another one is kind of projection of fear onto difference. So I would say a lot of our horror movies are designed around a person who's neuro diverse, being the monster. A lot of our villains are neurodiverse, and they're the villain, and so their facial expression is flat. It doesn't it doesn't behave the way a normative face behaves, and that implies that behind that face is evil, if that makes sense. So this is a projection onto the villain, the bad guy, the Joker, is an example of neurodiverse character who's evil. There are so many of these. Even like Michael Myers, has a flat faced mask and he in some. Ways, looks like an autistic face can look which is sort of flat, not expressing its full range of emotions. And the implication is that the face is honest to what's happening inside. But I would say that an autistic person has lots of emotion, a full range of emotion, but the face doesn't always connect to those emotions. So I had to learn to smile, for example, when I felt happy. I had to learn to connect emotion to my face so that people would know what I was feeling. And I have to remember to do that. Sometimes I can be I can be staring, looking very serious and very happy at the same time. And then I remember, Oh, I'm not smiling. I should smile. I should show people how I'm feeling inside. So that belief that the face, that underneath the face, there's evil, that there's there's distrust, that you can't trust, that there's a lack of empathy. None of that's true. Autistic people have lots of empathy. It's just a matter of showing it through politeness and through the look on our face. That's something we have to learn to do. It's not not necessarily natural to us, but but we learned we can learn to do it. And so these are some of the kinds of misconceptions someone with with OCD. It's very common to have OCD obsessive compulsive disorder in the movies that will look like someone who's obsessed with cleanliness and the sort of anal retentive and that's funny they make, they make fun of that to have OCD is not funny, and germs is one of the ways OCD can express itself. But there are many other ways safety, being harmed, having social phobia. And it's, it's the mind thinking itself into circles and saying, in order to be safe, I have to count to seven. I have to count to seven, count to seven, count to seven, I have to count to seven. But, you know, a person with OCD is a wonderful person who has this part of the mind that's overprotective. It's, the way the mind is protecting itself. And so it usually looks like there's a danger to protect myself from. The danger I have to do something. And sometimes that looks like washing your hands three or four times. But OCD is very common, very misunderstood, much more complex than it appears in the movies. So each of these areas, I would say we are misunderstood. We are misrepresented not by ourselves, but by the normative writers, the normative actors. We don't get to play ourselves in movies. You don't have an OCD actor playing an OCD character. So in a sense, in the same way that it's wrong to do black face in film where a white actor pretends to be a black actor. That happens all the time. In disabilities, you have people without autism pretending to be autistic and misrepresenting us left, right and center. You have writers who are not autistic writing autistic characters. You have writers who do not have OCD making fun of OCD. That's just wrong. So in this disability space, we are behind the curve in terms of understanding just how ableist our society is and how ableist normative. And that means we favor the able the normal. We think of the abled as the normal and and then we think of the other as the outsider, the separate able to be made fun of. You think of a film like Napoleon Dynamite. This is a film about three autistic characters, really four. Napoleon Dynamite and his brother and his two best friends all have autism, and there are different expressions of autism in the film Napoleon Dynamite is funny. He's hilarious. I love the film, but at the same time, I recognize I'm being made fun of Napoleon Dynamite focus his interest, his strange brilliance, his different body movements, his difficulty with social cues. And the point of the movie is to laugh and laugh and laugh from a normative point of view, to laugh at the difference, the social differences of the autistic person so complicated, isn't it? Don't fear us. The fact that we're different doesn't mean we're evil. Don't fear us. The fact that we have a different way of expressing ourselves. Doesn't mean that behind that difference lurks evil and that kind of othering, that monstrous ism of disability and difference goes way back. There's even things like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. There are characters who are have a disability, and that's the mark of their evil and their difference. Even Captain Hook is a character, a pirate character. He's missing an arm. He has a disability, and in its place is a monstrous weapon. That's a great example of the way difference is Monstro sized. He has an eye patch so he's half blind. He's missing one arm, and that makes him evil by two ways, by two different disabilities, he's been evil fired. We could say the evil vacation of disability. So there's a lot there. I would also say that more students than you realize, more people than you realize, have schizophrenia, and they're not bad and they're not evil, and they're not dangerous of in any way. They are living their lives among us. And sometimes they're hearing voices, and they just, they just live with that. They know the voices aren't real, but there they are. They can see things. I had one student who told me that at this moment horses were running through the walls and through our bodies. He lives all day with that, and yet, there he is in class, taking notes, taking tests. You know, it's great guy, fantastic human being. And so this is not something to be made fun of and othered and Monster sized. It's something to accept that we are human beings, part of the group, part of the collective. We are in the circle. Pull us into the circle. Let us be with you in the circle. Let us not be so afraid of what you'll do to us if we're different.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, I appreciate you answering that and really kind of going over like these different terms, the misconceptions, and really kind of defining that, explaining it, which I think just solidifies why the cog is important to have. So let's say someone's listening to this and like, I really wouldn't want to see this space. Where can they go? 

Speaker 1  
Well, they can always email me. chadsw@csusb.edu and the space is UH. That's University Hall on campus, fourth floor. Go up to the fourth floor and then go and turn right. It's 402. And it's open from nine to five, Monday through Friday is our plan, and it will open in a maybe a week from now. We haven't opened it yet, but we have 10 interns working, and they'll be holding the space open while they do programming. So you can be looking out, not only for for you can come to the cog and you can meet people there. And we'll also be doing programming where you can come in if you have neuro divergency. I hope you do. I hope you come see us. I hope you make friends with us. We're very welcoming good natured people, and we we accept you as you are, we love you as you are. And we also are interested in allies. A lot of times, people with a brother who has autism or a sister has autism end up marrying someone with autism. It's really interesting phenomenon where people are comfortable around difference, and they are attracted to difference. And so we have a lot of so we have a lot of friends. We have a lot of you know, come be friends with us. Come learn about us and just be with us. I think it's a great it's also a really interesting way forward for for new thinking and new writing disabilities literature is a very interesting new movement. Disabilities literature and disability studies from within. It doesn't mean we are being studied. It means we are doing the study. We are studying ourselves from within and also the differences with with otherness. We are advocating for ourselves. So we aren't the subject of study anymore. We are promoting the study of the world with us in the position we're in. It's a very different way to look at research. So it's an exciting time and space. I'd love to have you come see us. We also have a website through the SSD. We're part of services to students with disabilities. We're connected, and if anyone wants to donate to us, you can donate to SSD, earmarked to the cog neuro Diversity Center. You can also go onto our website and go directly onto the Amazon wish list and just buy us a book or two. That'd be fantastic. That'd be so good if you could do that for us, we're trying to build that library.

Matt Markin  
And as we end this, this recording, anything that I'll leave the last word to you, anything you want to add about The Cog, or anything to say to our students?

Dr. Chad Sweeney  
The most important thing is for new for students to come in. The most important thing of all is just come and just be with us. My interns this year. They are fantastic people. I have students who are on the spectrum and who have different different kind of neuro differences. They are fantastic. You would love these people. I would love for you to come meet them. And we want to know you. We want to know you so, so come be with us. We can play chess together. We can play video games. We can read together. We can just sit quietly. We can talk about life. We can share experiences. It feels so good to share and understand the commonality of our lives. I love talking with people about their strengths and their you know, difficulties, sometimes as othered, but also their strengths. And their wonderful projects and their arts. We are photographers and writers and thinkers. We are dancers. We love life. And so, you know, let's, let's come together and love life together. And I think we can, we can be that for each other.

Matt Markin  
Awesome. Well, great way to end this interview. Dr Sweeney, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. 

Dr. Chad Sweeney  
Thank you, Matt.