Spatialising Neurodiversity: Compulsive Geographies
Diana BeljaarsHybrid
Meeting ID: 923 3165 4438
Passcode: 291846
When arguing that neurodiversity entails a different perception and understanding of the world, what world or worlds are we referring to? How can we describe these worlds without employing neurotypical frameworks of reference and staying true to the experience? This talk will offer such a way by focusing on compulsive affects, urges, and action. Taking a spatial approach and employing postphenomenological and post-humanist theories, and seeing compulsions as body-world relations, I critically deconstruct neurotypical environments to then reconstruct compulsive worlds. These worlds consist of multiple kinds of dynamic material constellations that require compulsive affirmation, stabilisation, and disruption. This work is based on narrative and multiple ethnographic methods and was conducted as collaborative research with 15 Tourettic people who also had autistic, ADHD, OCD, anxiety, and depression sensibilities. As such, this work contributes to critical neurodiversity studies a set of ordering principles within the neurodivergent experiential realm.
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Diana Beljaars (she/her) is a research associate at the Swansea University Medical School. She is interested in spatial manifestations of medicalised phenomena, as well as the knowledge formation and institutional responses to them. As such, her work draws on human geography, medical humanities, continental philosophy, disability studies, and compulsion-related neuropsychiatry. Currently, she mostly works on mechanisms of (in)access to primary and emergency care for marginalised groups and sits on the Ministerial Advisory Group for Neurodiversity in Wales. In her first monograph Compulsive Body Spaces (Routledge, 2022) she set out a spatial theory for Tourettic compulsion. Her work also appears in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, GeoHumanities, and she co-edited Civic Spaces and Desire (Routledge, 2019).
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Meeting ID: 923 3165 4438
Passcode: 291846