The Creativity of Autistic Students in the Arts and Humanities
Alex Chand, Rebecca Lewis and Anna Stenning highlight the role of autistic students in dispelling myths about both autism and the epistemic authority of the arts and humanities.
Olfactory Overload: Knowing the Neurodivergent Nose
Kim Crowder recounts, discusses, and explores neurodiversity and a heightened sensitivity to smell. Olfactory: Of or pertaining to the sense of smell; concerned with smelling. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. My first post-pandemic train
Poetry and Stimming
In this blog for World Autism Acceptance Week, James McGrath, an autistic poet and academic, advocates the value of “stimming” and explores how it relates to poetry. I dedicate the lipogramatic poem below to
A Gift of Wellbeing from the Autistic Paradigm
How may individuals with sensory acuity and struggling with fear and anxiety be encouraged to participate more in social activities? Dawn-joy Leong reimagines conducive spaces for all, inspired by natural Autistic ways of coping with and responding to hypersensitivity.
‘A Philosophy of Madness’ Book Forum: Part Three
Becki Smith reviews A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking (The MIT Press, 2020) by Wouter Kusters (translated by Nancy Forest-Flier). This is Part Three of a Book Forum on A Philosophy
Life and Death in the Nervous System: A Review of Matthew Wolf-Meyer’s ‘Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age’
James Rakoczi reviews Matthew Wolf-Meyer’s Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). Unraveling is about facilitated communication, regimes of personhood, and just how far our nervous systems
Shouting Above the Noise: Autistic Life Writing and the Interdisciplinary Autism Research Festival
In this post, Anna Stenning demonstrates how life writing by autistic authors contributes to medical and cultural framings of autism. She also introduces the Interdisciplinary Autism Research Festival, which will take place in May 2021.
Fantastic Autistic: Neurodiversity, Estrangement and Playing with the Weird
Creative writer David Hartley reflects on the connections – productive and problematic – between autism and the fantastical. Being a younger sibling to an autistic person is in itself something of curious experience. The
What our bodies are telling us (Review)
Emine Gurbuz, PhD student in the Psychology Department, Durham University, reviews the ‘Interoception: Sensation and Embodied Awareness’ workshop at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University on 8th November 2018. Interoception, defined as “the process