Readers, Authors, and Autism – POSTPONED

***Due to the the COVID-19 virus and for the safety of our attendees and two guests, we are postponing this event until the fall. We are sorry about this, but check back to future updates. For more updates on what Duke is doing about the coronavirus, check out this website: https://coronavirus.duke.edu/***

Location: Ahmadieh Lecture Hall, C105 The Garage – Franklin Humanities Institute (Smith Warehouse Bay 4)

Time: 12 PM – Light lunch, 12:30 – 2 PM – Event

Date: March 20, 2020

Light lunch will be provided

Register for the talk here!

Walk-ins are always welcome.

Join us for lectures and discussion with two major scholars of Neurodiversity and Autism, Melanie Yergeau (University of Michigan) and Ralph Savarese (Grinnell College) in relation to their recent books See It Feelingly and Authoring Autism.

* This event is co-sponsored with FHI and the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences (DIBS) as part of the Neurohumanities Research Group *

The Discourse of Heterogeneity and “Many Outcomes” in Autism: What Ends Does It Serve?

From the beginning, the concept of neurodiversity has faced opposition—much of it ferocious and much of it tied to functioning labels. (The more autistic you are, the logic goes, the less appropriate a difference model.) As stories of autistic happiness and accomplishment across the spectrum have flooded the culture, and as the culture has begun to make room for autism by rethinking its attachment to norms, opponents have doubled down, claiming that the concept’s advocates have neglected, of all things, diversity. Not diversity as it is traditionally understood (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) but as functioning ability and linguistic competence. The neurodiversity movement, opponents charge, betrays those who can’t read or write, abandons overwhelmed caregivers, and homogenizes autism. As one scholar puts it, “’Neurodiversity’ is a theory of how everyone on some level is the same, how everyone is translatable, not of how some people may remain untranslatable, at least in terms of language use.” With my recent book, See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor (Duke UP 2018) in mind, I will explore this new line of attack.

Bio:

Ralph James Savarese is the author of two books, Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption (Other Press, 2007) and See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor (Duke UP, 2018). He is also the co-editor of three collections, including the first on the concept of neurodiversity. A fourth, The Futures of Neurodiversity, is under contract with the Modern Language Association and will be edited with Elizabeth Donaldson and Melanie Yergeau. In 2012-2013, he was a neurohumanities fellow at Duke University’s Institute for Brain Sciences. A documentary about his son’s inclusion journey appeared on PBS in 2017 and won a Peabody Award. Titled Deej, it follows DJ from high school to Oberlin College, where he was that institution’s first nonspeaking student with autism. Ralph teaches American literature, creative writing, and disability studies at Grinnell College in Iowa.

Doing (or Not) the Robot: Autism, Theory of Mind, and Asexuality

In Authoring Autism Melanie Yergeau defines neurodivergence as an identity—neuroqueerness—rather than an impairment. Using a queer theory framework, Yergeau notes the stereotypes that deny autistic people their humanity and the chance to define themselves while also challenging cognitive studies scholarship and its reification of the neurological passivity of autistics. She also critiques early intensive behavioral interventions—which have much in common with gay conversion therapy—and questions the ableist privileging of intentionality and diplomacy in rhetorical traditions. Using storying as her method, she presents an alternative view of autistic rhetoricity by foregrounding the cunning rhetorical abilities of autistics and by framing autism as a narrative condition wherein autistics are the best-equipped people to define their experience. Contending that autism represents a queer way of being that simultaneously embraces and rejects the rhetorical, Yergeau shows how autistic people queer the lines of rhetoric, humanity, and agency. In so doing, she demonstrates how an autistic rhetoric requires the reconceptualization of rhetoric’s very essence.

Bio:

I am an associate professor of English and associate director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan. I’m an autistic academic, and my scholarly interests include writing studies, digital studies, queer rhetorics, and disability studies. My book, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (Duke UP), is a winner of the 2018 MLA First Book Prize, the 2019 CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Book Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship, and the 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. I am currently at work on a second book project on disability, digital rhetoric, surveillance, and sociality, tentatively titled Crip Data.

My other publications can be found in Journal of Social Philosophy, Kairos, Computers and Composition Online, Disability Studies Quarterly, and College English, among other places. Along with Patrick Berry and Tim Lockridge, I serve as an editor for Computers and Composition Digital Press, an imprint of Utah State UP/UP of Colorado.

For many years I served on the board of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN), a nonprofit organization run for and by autistic people, as well as the board of the Autism National Committee (also known as AutCom). I blog semi-regularly on matters of rhetoric, autistic culture, and technology at autistext.com.