Hello! Salut ! ¡Hola! Hallo! Привет! I’m Finn Gardiner.
I’m a disability rights advocate with interests in inclusive education, intersectional justice, healthcare equity (including mental health), comparative social policy, and inclusive technology, among other things. I have a Master of Public Policy degree from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University and a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Tufts University. I’m currently the director of policy and advocacy at the Autistic People of Color Fund, where I combine disability advocacy, policy analysis and research, and written and visual communications through policy briefs, mutual-aid projects, original reports and white papers, and contributions to research. In addition to my work at the APOC Fund, I also serve as a member of the Board of Directors at the Human Services Research Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to research and policy advocacy benefiting people with disabilities and seniors. Before I came to BU and the APOC Fund, I was the communications specialist at the the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy, housed at Brandeis University, and before that, I was a policy fellow at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network.
I’m a longtime public speaker who has appeared at a variety of venues, including the Obama White House’s 2016 LGBTQ Disability Day panel, the National Council on Disability’s panel on inclusive technology for people with disabilities, Neurodiversity Rising’s conference on inclusive employment, the United Nations’ 2016 Disability and Ageing Symposium, the United Nations’ 2019 World Autism Day conference, and the 2015 and 2017 American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities national conferences.
This blog is an assemblage: I write about politics, disability/chronic illness, gender, culture, language, healthcare, and more. It’s called “Multifarious Threads” for a reason.
About my politics and background:
I’m a queer Black leftist, though I’m not a Marxist, since traditional Marxist analysis doesn’t include disabled people, I’m not a hard materialist or physicalist, and I don’t think there’s a single ideal outcome. I detest tankie and campist politics and want nothing to do with people who think North Korea is a cool place to be, China is full of shiny happy people and not persecuting religious and ethnic minorities, or that Russia can do no wrong. At the same time, I have no patience for people who think the US, Britain, the EU, or NATO can do nothing wrong, which is clearly bullshit: the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan come to mind, among others. We need to have nuanced discussions about foreign policy and the left’s response to global conflicts, though those are rare to find these days.
Random facts about me:
- I live in a postage-stamp apartment just outside Boston with a ten-year-old round ball of cat named Callie.
- I love to draw, though I consider myself a serviceable artist at best.
- I have an especial fondness for anything that tastes like matcha tea.
- I used to be a prolific tweeter until Elon Musk turned the network into even more of a hell site than it already was.
- I habitually use British spelling in my personal writing—it’s a habit I picked up as a teenager from talking to a bunch of Australians and Brits online, and it seems to have stuck for 19 years. (I also lived in the UK for a few years as a kid, so that had an influence as well.)
- I enjoy learning languages, though I’m rusty at speaking them because I haven’t had any opportunities to practise them in a while. I’m relatively competent in Spanish, German and French, and I’m currently studying Russian (a mixture of self-study and classroom-based learning). I can read some Italian, Dutch and Romanian as well.
- My brain is full of stories, but I can’t seem to finish works of fiction.