2. Arts-based Practices in Neurodiversity Research
Hybrid
Meeting ID: 929 5883 9558
Passcode: 214347
Panellists: Chris Bailey, Sam Lucas, Nina Danon & Niamh Gallagher, Christian Hanser
Chair: Mars da Silvia Saude
Chris Bailey | Escaping the Post-Affect Society - resurrecting neurodivergent lost futures
Abstract: This presentation exemplifies the use of creative and arts-based practice—specifically my application of archival video through what I call a hauntological method—to critique dominant narratives that have shaped exclusionary understandings of the human mind, particularly in relation to neurodivergence.
Loosely building on two empirical research projects that engage with the concept of ‘neurodivergent literacies,’ this paper explores lived experience at the intersection of neurodivergence and culture. The Ruling Passions Project examined the so-called "special interests" of autistic adults, while The ADHD Students Project investigated neurodivergent experiences of reading and writing in and beyond academia. Both projects highlighted how neurodivergent ways of being are characterised by a fundamental mismatch between an individual’s internal life and the external expectations of broader society.
At the core of this presentation are two multimedia videos, produced through a process of neuroqueering (Walker, 2021), that respond to data from both projects. Informed by the work of cultural theorist Mark Fisher, these videos function as hauntological artefacts (2014), blending archival footage and music to evoke an emotive response. By revisiting and reinterpreting the past, I use these videos to illustrate what I term the ‘post-affect society’—a society that suppresses individuals’ internal drives in favour of external conditions, denying the legitimacy of motivation, agency, and desire.
Here, with a particular focus on desire, hope, and the precarity of childhood identity, this presentation interrogates the tensions between internal experience and societal constraints.
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Sam Lucas | Same Same but Different
Abstract: Research theory tells us to examine things differently. Growing up with difference, led me to explore being a neurodivergent bodymind through means other than words. Having a facility for clay enabled exploration of my feelings, opening the door of possibilities through which to impart this neurodivergent experience. The properties of clay emulate skin and the warmth from touch, create space to explore these intangible experiences of being, resulting in tangible dialogic forms.
Same same but different is a creative PhD investigation predominantly through clay into the diversity of neurodiversity, exposing the similarities and differences of being in a neurodivergent bodymind through a narrative-self lens. By mapping of my own neurodivergent experience with others and adopting Technologies of the self from Bourgeoise and Foucault I am exploring these shared experiences, highlighting the heterogeneity of the neurodivergent experience whilst simultaneously encouraging a sense of belonging. Semi - structured interviews with intersectional neurodivergent women were undertaken, exploring whether creativity in clay can encourage an embodied experience.
A novel transdisciplinary investigation, My Body in My Hands was a cocreated social media provocation engaging over 500 creative representations of how it feels to be in the body, highlighting diversity within neurodiversity, in concept, material and outcome. The images, objects and text were displayed within a touring physical exhibition, culminating in an artist book. These palm sized ceramic dialogic forms are interchangeable assemblages, reminiscent of two-dimensional exquisite corpse drawing, a metaphor for bodymind which is not a static unified form, but fluid, mutable and changed through experience over time.
My contribution to the conference, is two-fold I propose engaging the participants in a hands-on drop in workshop, where they create a small clay object in response to the provocation How does it feel in your body offering an alternative discourse and also presenting a paper.
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Nina Danon, Niamh Gallagher | Collaborative Musical Practice as Embodied Exploration of Neurodivergence and Disability
Abstract: ''Embodied Bodyminds' is a creative project that combines composer Nina Danon's research on musical neuroqueering with performer Niamh Gallagher’s research on disabled embodiment, to illuminate the complex interplay between our bodies, minds, and musical practices. In this paper, we will present the preliminary findings from this project, unveiling a methodology for embodied musical exploration. How can foregrounding our neurodivergent and disabled experiences, as a baseline for methodology, allow us to expand our understanding of working within a musical collaboration? And how can this practice deepen our understanding of our own non-normative bodyminds?
We will reflect on the importance of prioritising the design of a safe and comfortable creative process in which to safely explore our experiences, to co-create performance and compositional techniques that centre and externalise the felt dimensions of our non-normative bodyminds. This mutual sense of acceptance is key to challenge the neuronormative constraints traditionally placed on the composer-performer relationship, in order to develop a creative practice that emphasises the embodied dimension of disabled neurodivergent experiences.
This paper proposes a model for future practice research that highlights embodied musical collaboration as a methodology to counter the normative expectations placed on non-normative bodyminds, to investigate the tacit aspects of disabled neurodivergent experiences.
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Christian Hanser | A pop-up civic sanctuary on wheels
The pop-up civic sanctuary on wheels is a mobile shepherd’s hut installed in public spaces to share moments of silence, of storytelling and other artistic expression. The hut has been used since 2010 in community education settings. This travelling public shelter frames educational processes differently, as collective retreat from overwhelming demands formulated by a neurotypically-wired (educational) world. The wanderings with the shepherd’s hut are both a practice as well as a methodology shaped over time through the crafting of a professional stance which integrates my own overlapping neurodivergences: the need to retreat to avoid sensory overload and the constant curiosity for external stimuli and departures. The hut helps to retreat from something, but it also invites us to move towards somewhere: new imaginaries. This presentation will focus on the relational disruptions that can happen when the hut is installed in academic settings, such as conferences and other extroversion-oriented networking events. The hut-in-the-fringe provides a provocation to thinking creatively, laterally, empathetically about academic hospitality. The concrete case study of a civic sanctuary in Higher Education seeks to engage with a paradox that is frequently encountered in academia: neurodiversity research co-produced with neurodivergent voices is now in high demand in universities, but the dynamic and high-pressure field is still frequently framed in exclusionary formats. Certain benchmarks can put neurodivergent scholars at a disadvantage if the gold standard for impact equates with loud, quantifiable claims. The discreet idea of a horizontal hospitality commons as an alternative to vertical, individual career progression proposes shared retreat as a liberatory praxis challenging mainstreamed knowledge production and extraction. In an ableist university, the neoliberal metrics of individual progression often lead to energy depletion. Academic success and meltdowns or shutdowns can lie side by side in the academic everyday life. How can we nurture acts of retreat?
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Speaker Bios:
Chris Bailey: Dr. Chris Bailey is a senior lecturer in Education at Sheffield Hallam University.
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Sam Lucas: Sam Lucas is a British artist and PhD researcher at University of Sunderland in ceramics and wellbeing focusing on neurodiversity and body awareness. She has exhibited her work internationally and highlights were exhibiting at Art Genève 2020 with Taste Contemporary Gallery and AWARD The headlining exhibition at British Ceramics Biennial 2019. She uses clays therapeutic and expressive qualities to create ambiguous figurative assemblages. Her work is not about making “pretty things” but sparking conversations and encouraging the viewer to be curious and question their own relationship to their bodymind and how others may be different from them, or the same.
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Nina Danon: Nina Danon is a disabled and neurodivergent composer and doctoral researcher. She is currently undertaking a PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, funded by AHRC CHASE. Her practice research project, under the supervision of Prof John L. Drever and Dr Alexis Bennett, investigates the interconnection between music and neurodivergence.
Niamh Gallagher: Niamh Gallagher is a disabled and neurodivergent musician and practice-researcher. Niamh’s research explores the body and disabled identity through her practice as a violist, incorporating embodiment and somatic studies. She is a doctoral researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London (funded by AHRC CHASE), supervised by Dr Mira Benjamin and Dr Jenn Kirby.
Christian Hanser : Christian Hanser is a community educator. You can find out more about the pop-up civic sanctuary on wheels at The Welcome Hut website.
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Zoom Meeting ID: 929 5883 9558
Passcode: 214347