Interdependence in Research and Community: Relationality and Creative Connections Across Neurodiversity and Multimodal Communication

• In Event: Forging Community Through Intersectional Disability Studies in Education

Abstract

Purpose
This presentation highlights a collaborative narrative inquiry process centering experiences of neurodivergence and multimodal communication in higher education through dialogue. Informed by the 2019 preconference, we discuss complexities of doing and (re)presenting this work, including possibilities and barriers of relationality, interdependence and community building as/through research.

Framework
This presentation is grounded in Disability Studies in Education (DSE), and the intersecting, intersectional work of neurodivergent and autistic scholars and activists. DSE centers bodyminds that disrupt notions of normativity, highlighting oppressive social, educational, political and economic systems (Baglieri et al., 2011). Work on neurodiversity as an intersectional paradigm, movement and narrative (Brown, 2016; Walker, 2014; Yergeau, 2018) is central to research and practice that honors thinking, moving, communicating, feeling and doing as reflections of human diversity and sites of resistance. Yet, participation expectations in education and research largely privilege neurotypical performance, impacting who is positioned as knowledge producers and what forms of representation count. Further, autistic people who type to communicate who require interdependent communication, regulation and/or organizational supports continue to fight for their right to choose and access communication methods (Sequenzia, 2016). By examining our inquiry process countering inherently ableist and racist academic contexts while within them, we grapple these tensions, challenging presence as (compulsory) resistance in the academy for some but not others, as well as the histories and practices that situate it as such (Dolmage, 2017).

Inquiry Modes
A 3-year inquiry through digital dialogue about college allowed for connection across time and distance, while raising questions about doing so in/for the academy. Here, we reflexively consider methodological and relational possibilities generated when narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connolly, 2000) and disability studies methodology (Minich, 2016) function to center storied experiences of neurodivergence and multimodal communication in, about, and resisting (re/producing?) higher education structures. We attend to decentering neurotypical experiences, and the ways that the academy upholds ideologies of “smartness” (Leonardo & Broderick, 2011), particularly at intersections of race and disability in autistic experiences and mainstream representations of it (Brown, 2016).

Data sources
This presentation explores barriers, tensions and possibilities of centering experiences of/with autistic college graduates who type and use multimodal communication in an inquiry group comprised of neurotypical and neurodivergent members dialoguing as inquiry.

Points of View
We consider co-constructing a dialogic interspace hinging on multimodality and neurodiversity as metaphor for community building with/in/out the academy. This presentation illustrates relationality, reciprocity and community difficult to describe, particularly through exclusionary dissemination venues built on/through conformity. We raise key areas of discussion: Bridging connections over time, space and context, with/out institutional support; Co-researching complexities; Possibilities and constraints of inquiring through oppressive spaces as relational activism, while upholding lived experience.

Significance
This work highlights research methods pivoting on neurodiversity, multimodal communication, positionality and partnership, modeling disability studies methodology as action (Lester & Nusbaum, 2017; Minich, 2016). We call forth the impossibility of this inquiry absent interdependence and from only traditional academic spaces. This process can inform research, curriculum, participation and connection through community.

Authors

• Casey Woodfield, Rowan University

• Katherine Vroman, Syracuse University