Contemplating teacher talk through a critical autism studies lens

Nick Hodge

Patty Douglas

Madeleine Kruth

Stephen Connolly

Nicola Martin

Kendra Gowler

Cheryl Smith

Abstract

This chapter begins with a digital story made as part of the Re•Storying Autism in Education project by Nick Hodge. These short first-person multimedia videos about autism and education offer new ways of knowing, and trouble, disrupt and reform the dominant cultural scripts of autism such as autism as biomedical disorder, brain difference and insidious child stealer (Douglas et al. 2019). Hodge’s digital story invites us to reflect on and problematise everyday examples of teacher talk. Critical Autism Studies is employed as a methodological tool to analyse how in classroom chatter the apparently mundane and ordinary in fact conceal and reproduce dominant disabling discourses that deny autistic children personhood and position them as other and problem. Statements, such as ‘careful she’s a biter’ and ‘he’s one of our special needs’ swirl around children and then land and may be absorbed. The danger is they may become internalised as the structures of who children come to think they are and form the boundaries of who they may come to be. We asked for examples of teacher talk that autistic people have experienced and which they feel harmed their sense of who they are on Twitter. We employ CAS to identify the disabling structures that permit and sustain such teacher-talk. In doing so, we extend its reach beyond the theoretical to propose new ways of talking to and about children in class that validate and empower rather than reduce and deny.

Recommended Citation

Hodge, N., Douglas, P., Kruth, M., Connolly, S., Martin, N., Gowler, K. and Smith, C. (2022). Contemplating teacher talk through a critical autism studies lens. in: Milton, D. and Ryan, S. (ed.) The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Autism Studies. Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group).

To view online: https://doi-org.proxy.queensu.ca/10.4324/9781003056577

Dis/entangling the cultural politics of care

Martina Smith

Katherine Runswick-Cole

Sara Ryan

Patty Douglas

Abstract

This paper explores how understandings of care can be prefigured through engagements with concepts of ableism and sanism as productive and radical companions for (re)thinking care. Working with family carers and people with learning disabilities as part of a co-produced project based in England: Tired of spinning plates: an exploration of the mental health experiences of adults and/or older carers of adults with learning disabilities (National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) 135080, October 2022-November 2024), we notice the absence of the concepts of ableism and sanism in theorisations of the cultural politics of care. We begin by describing family carers’ complex entanglements with categories of ‘carer’, ‘learning disability’, and ‘mental health’. We draw on theorisations of ableism and sanism to inform our analysis of caring relationships, attending to the dis/temporalities and dis/locations of care and the centrality of dis/political love. We conclude by reflecting on what academics, policy makers and practitioners might learn about caring practices from family carers and people with learning disabilities, crucially acknowledging and embracing the power of dis/political love in caring relationships.

Recommended Citation:

Smith, M., Runswick-Cole, K., Ryan, S., & Douglas, P. (2024). Dis/entangling the cultural politics of care. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 26(1), 28-43. DOI: 10.16993/sjdr.1101 

Available online at: https://sjdr.se/articles/10.16993/sjdr.1101

Autistic, Surviving and Thriving Under COVID-19:

Imagining Inclusive Autistic Futures

Sherri Liska

Katrissa Singer

Emily Gillespie

Sheryl Peters

Patty Douglas
Associate Professor (Brandon University)

Abstract

This article takes up Mia Mingus’ call to “leave evidence” of how we have lived, loved, cared, and resisted under ableist neoliberalism and necropolitics during COVID-19 . We include images of artistic work from activist zines created online during the COVID-19 pandemic and led by the Re•Storying Autism Collective. The zines evidence lived experiences of crisis and heightening systemic and intersectional injustices, as well as resistance through activist art, crip community, crip knowledges, digital research creation, and the forging of collective hope for radically inclusive autistic futures—what zine maker Emily Gillespie calls “The neurodivergent, Mad, accessible, Basic Income Revolution.” We frame the images of artistic work with a coauthored description of the Collective’s dream to create neurodivergent art, do creative research, and work for disability justice under COVID-19. The zine project was a gesture of radical hope during crisis and a dream for future possibilities infused with crip knowledges that have always been here. We contend that activist digital artmaking is a powerful way to archive, theorize, feel, resist, co-produce, and crip knowledge, and a way to dream collectively that emerged through the crisis of COVID-19. This is a new, collective, affective, and aesthetic form of evidence and call for “forgetting” ableist capitalist colonialism and Enlightenment modes of subjectivity and knowledge production that target different bodies to exploit, debilitate, and/or eliminate, and to objectify and flatten what it means to be and become human and to thrive together.

This manuscript has been published and is available in Lateral: Journal of The Cultural Studies Association, published online at: https://csalateral.org/section/crip-pandemic-life/autistic-surviving-thriving-covid-autistic-futures-zine-restorying-collective-liska-singer-gillespie-peters-douglas/

Recommended Citation:

Liska, Sherri, Katrissa Singer, Emily Gillespie, Sheryl Peters and Patty Douglas. (2022). Autistic, Surviving and Thriving Under COVID-19: Imagining Inclusive Autistic Futures—A Zine Making Project by the Re•Storying Autism Writing Collective. Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry. 11(2)

Storytelling Methods on the Move

The Re•Storying autism collective

Raya Shields
MA (York university)

Steacy Easton
PhD student

Julia Gruson-Wood
Postdoctoral fellow (University of guelph)

Margaret F. Gibson
Assistant professor (University of Waterloo)

Patty Douglas
Associate professor (brandon university)

Carla Rice
Professor (university of Guelph)

Abstract

This article takes up multimedia storytelling and interference as methods on the move in and beyond critical Autism studies and considers their contributions to post and qualitative studies in education. We write as a collective of Autistic and non-Autistic researchers, kin, artists, and educators. We think generatively with the tensions of trying to do anti-normative research through a multimedia storytelling project about Autism justice in education within the confines of academic spaces across differing relationalities to Autism. We situate our method within new materialist ontology, homing in on the concept of “interference” —something we believe has not been done within critical Autism studies before—considering what interference as metaphor and method might offer our analytic approach that diffraction alone might miss. Through analyzing core tensions in the research process and in three films made by Autistic participant-storytellers, we show how Autism flows together and/or collides with storytelling and other post/qualitative methods to make new story forms and modes, and with these, new patterns for understanding Autism and justice in research and education. Our aim is transformative—to open space through post/qualitative research processes for Autistic perspectives and to release multiple stories of Autism into the world. In this we lean into interference and the tangle of research and relationality, power, and possibility for more innovative, just, and critically hopeful knowledge and practice.

This manuscript has been published and is available in International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, published online 20 April 2022, http//www tandfonljne com/10.1080/09518398.2022.206125

Recommended Citation:

The Re•Storying Autism Writing Collective, Raya Shields, Steacy Easton, Julia Gruson-Wood, Margaret F. Gibson, Patty N. Douglas & Carla M. Rice (2022) Storytelling methods on the move, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2022.2061625

Making Memories, Making Madness

Making Memories, Making Madness: Mad (M)others of Disabled Children Write Back Through Digital Storytelling

Patty Douglas
Brandon University

Katherine Runswick-Cole
University of sheffield

Penny fogg
University of sheffield

Sara ryan
oxford university

Abstract

This article focuses on a story of education, mothering, disability and madness, with two aims in mind:

● To reveal and to reflect upon the ways in which (m)others of dis/abled children are labelled as, and are made to feel, mad in their encounters with the psy- professions (education, psychology and psychiatry).

● To explore the potential of digital storytelling as a method of writing back against dominant oppressive narratives of education, mothering and disability.

This paper is written by mothers of adult offspring with disabilities about our experiences of raising our children. We write about our experiences of making a film about being mothers. We explain that we have all been told by professionals that our beliefs about our children and what is best for them are mad—that is, they are unreasonable or not to be trusted. In the paper, we reject this view and argue that our voices should be listened to. We hope that this story telling process can reveal the ways in which discourses of madness are used to oppress (m)others of dis/abled children in encounters in education. We also hope that we can begin to build narratives of resistance so that madness no longer becomes the discourse of choice in encounters between (m)others and practitioners.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by the Ontario Association on Developmental Disabilities in the Journal on Developmental Disabilities, available online at: https://oadd.org/journal/volume-27-number-2-changing-social-welfare-provisions-and-shifting-family-dynamics/

Recommended Citation:

Douglas, Patty, Katherine Runswick-Cole, Penny Fogg & Sara Ryan. (2021). Making Memories, Making Madness: Mad (M)others of Disabled Children Write Back Through Digital Storytelling. Journal on Developmental Disabilities. 27 (2): 39-56.

Decolonizing Autism

Decolonizing Stories of Autism in Education

Patty Douglas

Sheryl Peters

Published in Brandon University Research Connection

Re•Storying Autism: An Interview

Re•Storying Autism: An Interview with Patty Douglas and Carla Rice

David denborough
The Dulwich Centre

Patty Douglas
Brandon University

Carla Rice
University of Guelph

Abstract

The Re•Storying Autism project is a Canadian–British collaboration that seeks to interrupt dominant and limiting narratives of autism through an alternative storytelling process. Short films made by people who identify as autistic or who have attracted a label of autism tell preferred stories that shift understandings, expand representations and create space for practices of difference. Carla Rice and Patty Douglas, two of the project leaders, caught up with David Denborough to reflect on the principles and practices embraced by the Re•Storying Autism project, and to consider the project’s potential for contributing to a framework that may be useful to narrative practitioners.

https://dulwichcentre.com.au/product/restorying-autism-an-interview-with-patty-douglas-and-carla-rice/

Mad mothering

Mad mothering: Learning from the intersections of madness, mothering and disability

Patty Douglas
Brandon University

Katherine Runswick-Cole
University of Sheffield

Sara Ryan
Oxford University

Penny Fogg
University of Sheffield

Abstract

This paper brings together the fields of Mad Studies (LeFrancois et al.), Matricentric Feminism (O’Reilly, Matricentric Feminism) and Critical Disability Studies (Goodley, “Dis/entangling Critical Disability Studies”). Our aim is to expose and challenge “relations of ruling” (Smith 79) that both produce and discipline ‘mad mothers of disabled children’. We begin our analysis by exploring the un/commonalities of the emerging histories of the three disciplines. We then identify analytical points of intersection between them including: critiques of neoliberalism; troubling the ‘norm’ (including radical resistance and activism); intersectionality, post-colonial and queer theory. Finally, we turn to points of divergence and possible tensions between these theoretical approaches as we explore the absence of disability in Matricentric Feminism, the contested place of mothering in Critical Disability Studies and the absence of mothering in Mad Studies. We are invested throughout in the political possibilities of affect and activism that emerge from the feminist insight that the ‘personal is political’. Finally, we consider what can be learned from an intersectional critique of ‘good mothering’ and how this theorization might inform social justice work.

This is the accepted author copy of an article forthcoming (2021) in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. 

Recommended Citation:

Douglas, Patty, Katherine Runswick-Cole, Sara Ryan & Penny Fogg. (2021). Mad

mothering: Learning from the intersections of madness, mothering and disability. Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. 15 (1): 39-56.

Making spaces

Making Spaces: Multimedia Storytelling as Reflective, Creative Praxis

Carla Rice
University of Guelph

Andrea LaMarre
University of Guelph

Nadine Changfoot
Trent University

Patty Douglas
Brandon University

Abstract

In this article, we explore our experiences as researchers and participants in multimedia storytelling, an arts-informed method wherein we work with artists and aggrieved communities to speak back to dominant representations through film. In positioning ourselves as storytellers, we do research with rather than “on” or “for” participants, allowing us to connect in practical and affective ways as we co-create films. Drawing from dialogues about our workshop experiences, we outline four themes that make the storytelling space unique: reflexivity; structure and creativity; transitional space and reverberations; and fixing versus being/becoming with. We analyze our self-reflexive films on mind-body difference as “biomythographies,” as films that situate stories of ourselves in technological-temporal-spatial relations and that highlight how we make/experience change through creative research. Multimedia storytelling, we argue, allows us to enact reflexive creative praxis in a way that opens to difference rather than trying to fix it, forging an ethic we find all too rare in the neoliberal university.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Qualitative Research in Psychology available online at: 10.1080/14780887.2018.1442694

Recommended Citation:

Rice, C., A. LaMarre, N. Changfoot & P. Douglas. (2020). Making spaces: Multimedia storytelling as reflexive, creative praxis. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 17(2), 222-239. 10.1080/14780887.2018.1442694

Arguments in autism debate

Arguments in autism debate in Ontario have missed the mark

Margaret F. Gibson
University of Waterloo

Julia Gruson-Wood
University of Guelph

Wendy McGuire
Neurodiversity Network

Patty Douglas
Brandon University

Estée Klar
York University

This is an Op-Ed about the autism debates in Ontario published by the Waterloo Region Record.

Recommended Citation:

Gibson, Margaret F., Patty Douglas, Julia Gruson-Wood, Estee Klar & Wendy McGuire. (2019). Arguments in autism debate in Ontario have missed the mark, Waterloo Region Record, 15th May. https://www.therecord.com/opinion-story/9222539-arguments-in-autism-debate-in-ontario-have-missed-the-mark/