Cripped Bodyminds as Posthuman: Echolalia and Non-Verbality in Educational Worlding

• In Event: Generative Difference and More-Than-Human Educational Worldings

Abstract

This presentation draws on my lived experience as an autistic person to argue that the cripped bodymind is already posthuman, embodying alternative ways of being and knowing that disrupt the normative ideals of autonomy, rationality, and communicative relationality embedded in education. Thus, I want to juxtapose the humanist stabilization of the normative being/knowing to enliven the cripped within/of its otheredness, thereby challenging the normed delineations of compulsory able-bodyminded reality. I theorize two autistic registers - echolalia and non-verbality - as posthuman modes of worlding. I argue that echolalia maintains an intra-active self-relation, and non-verbality is theorized as non-relation: a refusal of compulsory relationality (epistemic excess). Both modes offer ontic and epistemic insights that challenge humanist binaries of self/other, inside/outside, and knowing/not knowing.

Author

• Brad Bierdz, Georgia Southern University