Mission
The goal of RADAR is to contribute rigorous, ethical, and useful autism research by building a collaboration of autistic researchers* to conduct experiments, generate data, and communicate new information about the lives, experiences, and needs of autistic people so that research about us is no longer conducted without us.
*While formal research training is one source of knowledge, we believe the lived experience of autistic individuals provides important insight that is often missing from academia. We invite autistic people without a traditional academic background to join us as researchers.
Goals
- Conduct research that is rigorous, ethical, and informed by and useful to the autistic community
- Create a safe, inclusive, and accessible environment
- Provide opportunities for autistic individuals to build research skills
- Make inclusive, participatory research an expectation for autism research
- Evolve and grow in response to feedback and changing community needs
Acknowledging Our Limitations
RADAR is a brand new project. As a new project, we have limited resources and experience. We know the project won’t be perfect (or even close!) and we’ll need to make changes as we go.
Funding and compensation
RADAR was chosen to receive a Ruth Winifred Howard Diversity Scholars award from the Institute of Child Development. This initial funding enables us to pay Collaborators for time spent attending meetings and working on the project. We will continue to pursue funding opportunities so that we can commit to fairly compensating Collaborators for the duration of the project. In addition, we believe that participation as a Collaborator can help individuals build skills and create non-traditional pathways into research experience; Collaborators will have the opportunity to be listed as authors on publications if they choose to.
We will always be transparent about our funding status and acknowledge the fact that this project does not exist in a vacuum. Marginalized communities, particularly people with disabilities, have experienced and continue to experience exploitation in the form of unpaid or sub-minimum wage work and sheltered workshops. We will work to ensure we do not contribute to inequity in this way.
Scale
RADAR does not have a team of full-time staff to run the project. Currently, the work is being done by a single PhD student. In addition to getting RADAR up and running, the founder has classes and other research responsibilities. This means the project is starting small. In the future, we hope to be able to add more Collaborators, expand into different labs, widen the types of questions being studied, and create more formal training pathways.
Questions? Contact us.