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Enabling Geographies: Neurodivergence, Self-Authorship, and the Politics of Social Space
Abstract
Enabling Geographies: Neurodivergence, Self-Authorship, and the Politics of Social Space examines and co-documents the political relevance of alternative educational, vocational, and community-living strategies developed and implemented by autistic grassroots educators serving autistic and otherwise neurodivergent youth in Berkeley, California. These educators reject the conceptualization and treatment of neurodivergent embodiment and expression as a medical pathology or a charity case and, in concert with grassroots disability justice initiatives, reclaim it instead as a vibrant cultural and political experience. They so do while simultaneously calling for the emancipation and collective liberation of all disabled people. More specifically, our collaborative inquiry documents the role of autistic educators in the visioning of strategies designed to enable a creative opening of differential social spaces wherein to freely and fully embody neurodivergence. Neurodivergence is an umbrella term covering a wide range of alternative individual neurocognitive styles.
One of the main arguments of this dissertation is that disabled service providers are uniquely positioned to intervene and unsettle institutionalized ableism vis-à-vis “safety-net” programs, especially against the historical backdrop
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of traditional community (care) services. The term ‘transition services’ means a coordinated set of activities to facilitate a disabled person’s movement from school to post-school activities. To document these strategies, the autistic leaders in question and myself co-designed the line of inquiry, methodology, and goals of this dissertation. We held collaborative meetings, interviews, and group conferences for almost two years. Our findings are presented through activist ethnographic vignettes, oral narrative analysis, and historical-analytical frameworks emerging from disability studies, activist anthropology, critical sociology, postmodern philosophy, and critical human geography. Overall, our methodology aims at capturing the program’s dynamics and philosophy, its gains and successes, as well as the institutional barriers and limitations to developing and sustaining autistic leadership roles in disability service provision.
... Instead, miscommunications between neurotypical people and neurodivergent people are often blamed on neurodivergent people's perceived 'social deficits,' including in 'Theory of Mind.' This may relate people in primarily abled spaces failing to consider (or even be aware of) disability cultures grown from mutual recognition (Acevedo, 2018), including people in primarily neurotypical spaces failing to understand Autistic perceptions and cultures (Leong, 2016;Milton, 2012). Leong inverts Theory of Mind discourse to assert neurotypicals can't understand autistic mental processes. ...
... Like broader disability cultures (Acevedo, 2018), Neurodivergent cultures are themselves diverse, with differences between the Mad and Neurodiversity movements as one example. There is overlap between the two and space for conversation between them (Dekker, 1999;Graby, 2015), but they have different histories and trajectories. ...
... I have both seen and participated in group expressions of flapping, jumping, and rocking, as well as back-and-forth repetitions of enjoyable sounds and words during my engagement with Autistic communities. Autistic autobiographical writing can be considered as a cultural practice due to the general consideration of personal narratives in disability cultures (Acevedo, 2018), the tendency for Autistic authors to connect their narratives to Autistic communities (Rose, 2005), and the cultural knowledge and expertise shared within these personal narratives (Hillary, in press). Other neuro-cultural practices include banning flash photography, accepting others' natural level of eye contact whether it is more or less than typically expected in the local normative culture, forming relationships that may not depend on or involve speech, greater comfort with silences (Dekker, 1999), both giving and listening to intense monologues about niche topics as a sign of interest and respect (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, 2019), and adjusting the level and type of attention paid to nonverbal communications on an individual level to both include nonspeaking people and avoid misinterpreting people whose neurodivergent body languages we may struggle to interpret. ...
... We seek to understand and detail how autistic adults are currently leveraging ubiquitous technologies using an autism-as-culture lens as a prerequisite to propose designs for technological tools and strategies for EF mediation. Cultural Anthropologists have proposed that disability, including autism, is a culturally mediated phenomenon, productive of identity, afnity, and political coalition within and between other vectors of marginalization [2]. In our results, we intentionally deploy neurodivergent rhetorical forms, such as echoing, cascading, and abrupt transitions [43]. ...
... Disabled children have as much a right to life as children in colonized nations have a right to not become disabled through colonial violence (Puar, 2017). How do we promote disabled children's "best interests" in the absence of an understanding of disability as culture and culturally mediated (Acevedo, 2018;Kasnitz & Shuttleworth, 2001)? How do we imagine disability as culture without colonizing transnational contexts with Western figurations of disability pride and overcoming? ...
The governance of rights is a complex project of exercising ethical discretion in a systemically unethical society. This paper troubles the efficacy of rights as governable by exposing tensions within and between the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Grounded in a critical disability studies perspective, I question the possibility of respecting disability as a natural part of human diversity while simultaneously proposing that disabled children have a right to intervention. Who governs the definition of “health”, of “development”, of “access”, or of “best interests”? I interrogate the function of rights-based discourses in a global culture that has yet to fully abandon the project of eugenics. I present disturbing relations between researcher and subject in case studies of wearable technologies for autism intervention as a challenging site of analysis for the ethics of these interventions. I call us to question who truly benefits when we engage in the production of ‘includable bodies’ rather than the deconstruction of exclusionary environments.
Knowledge extraction and the absence of reciprocity between scholars and grassroots practitioners in mainstream disability research are topics of concern for scholar-activists committed to disability justice in cultural and social studies research. Critical methodologies such as praxis-oriented research and scholar-activism in disability studies have sought to decenter Euro-American notions of expertise and nondisabled expert knowledge by centering disabled grassroots knowledge and leadership in all aspects of the disability experience. Overall, the literature demonstrates that emancipatory methods such as scholar-activism and praxis-oriented research have had a liberatory effect on disability studies inquiry. It also suggests that nondisabled researchers in other areas have yet to critically examine their role in perpetuating systemic ableism in their research practices. This article builds upon and extends the existing literature by considering disability studies scholars’ methodological interventions in traditionally dominant fields such as anthropology and policy studies. To keep with a praxis-oriented approach to research, the article uses a contemplative inquiry approach to discuss these interventions. Concluding remarks discuss the political significance of praxis-oriented research and its role in subverting unbalanced power dynamics between academic researchers and disabled grassroots practitioners, thus enabling a move toward a liberatory disability politics.
In this creative nonfiction essay, I traverse through permutations of “fractal mechanics” as a means of processing experiences of oppression and imagining revolutionary futures. I introduce fractal mechanics as a method for thinking through how “the institution,” broadly understood, travels and transmutes from physical structure localized in place to a set of internalized rule sets that bind themselves to transinstitutionalized “host bodies”—a NeoLiberation. Through a series of vignettes illustrating violent experiences of “inclusion,” I explore how the institution is reproduced in neoliberal constructions of inclusion, liberation, and justice. I then integrate critiques of liberation within neoliberal frames with crip imaginings of justice-in-relation to explicate how fractal mechanics can be understood not only as a method of oppression but also a method for revolution. I close with a series of imaginaries that encourage us to prefigure, or dream, a fractal politic of intercommunal connection.
This paper argues that the ideological and material reproduction of “effective schooling” in the Age of Capital functions to normalize and perpetuate the unequal social relations and oppressive dynamics that characterize free market economies and their accompanying political and cultural practices in the historical and educational context of the United States of America. I argue that the intersection of three perspectives furthers the work of scholars grounded in the various disciplines—advocacy anthropology, the anthropology of education, and the mutual engagement of anthropology and critical disability studies—and demonstrates that a multi-inter- transdisciplinary lens is essential for deepening an understanding of the discourses as well as the concrete practices that push ‘disorderly’ student subjects into precarious circumstances that threaten their physical, emotional, and psychological integrity.
In its relatively short lifespan, applied behavioral analysis—the shaping of human behavior through operant conditioning—has risen to a state of eminence in the teaching and treatment of autistic children. This article reads the archive of behaviorist scholarship with and against the grain to two ends. First, I argue that behaviorism is a prevailing form of what gender studies scholar Kyla Schuller terms biophilanthropy, a form of biopolitics in which the technologies of control are rebranded as philanthropic ventures. I use biopolitics to demonstrate how inclusion into the capitalist society marks some (the includable) for life and some (the nonincludable) for (social) death, and some for violence aimed at recuperating the normative future. I use a case study from the corpus of behaviorist scholarship, “Effects of Punishment Procedures on the Self-Stimulatory Behavior of an Autistic Child,” to demonstrate how futurity is leveraged to seduce the teacher into the biopolitical project. My second use of this archive is to engage in a critical rereading of the text, locating moments of embodied resistance by the subject of the experiment. I make critical connections between the overlooked resistances within the archive of behaviorism and place these fugitive practices in continuity with contemporary notions of “neuroqueer(ing)” theorized by autistic scholars and activists.
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