Body of Language: The Rhythmic In-Between of Neurodiverse Knowledge Production

• In Event: Trans(re)lating Diversity in Academic Terrains

Abstract

Objective: Neurotypicality maintains that the mastery of language allows humans control over objects, including ideas and emotions, (Singh, 2018) with underlying assumptions being these ideas and emotions can be separated from each other, their ecologies and from humans. This artificial separation and localization of thoughts and feelings has long created the confinement of subjectivity as well as a hierarchization of humanness (Manning, 2013; Singh, 2018). Neurotypical deep structures in academia, including research dissemination in journal articles, edited books and conference presentations, privilege objectivity and academic language and exclude, not only many peoples, but also neurodiverse modes of knowledge production (Smagorinsky, 2020; Manning, 2016). The purpose of this paper is to present the unfolding of propositional encounters that move beyond neurotypical modes of research and research dissemination and to prompt multi-modal conversations about language, trans(re)latability of embodied knowledge and inclusivity in academia. We expand on neurotypical academic knowledge formation toward a neurodiverse wondering beyond words (Kolozsvari & Olsen, 2016), an engagement with languaging as a creative process.

Perspective: Neurodiversity maintains that there are diverse modes for knowing (thinking-feeling-learning) and that knowledge formation is ongoing/continuous and in ecological co-composition (Manning, 2016). These ways of knowing can operate in the interstices of languaging, where meaning is generated in the relationality that emerges between the different units of language, through syncopation. What would it mean to think rhythm as the activator that foregrounds the urgency of moving beyond the concreteness of already-knowable ideas and concepts?

Modes of Inquiry/Data Sources: This proposition to ‘language’ as a creative process begins with a sound component that grows out of the last few sentences of Gertrud Stein's “Narration: Four Lectures,” (2010) which talks to the capacity of words and non-words creating a complex co-composition. Using a MIDI controller, the different phrases, half-sentences, pauses, words and utterances are triggered and re-recorded. This rhythmic soundscape explores how rhythm in language is more than what holds words together, but what emerges in between. It inquires about the spaces where rhythm becomes the technique for re-defining a non-linear relation between thoughts, concepts, feelings, and words. The process then continues in co-composition, soundscape, and embodied movement with materials, which will be presented in a video recording, that stutters, echoes and stims as it languages its own path into rhythm making, creating knowledge beyond words.

Scholarly significance: Wells et al. (2021) question the roles of the intellectual and the academy, and Cruz (2021) further argues that “neurodiversity is traditionally excluded from the conversation” as “it is easy to dismiss those who are neurologically different, to ignore their stories and generativity associated with them” (p. 113). Manning (2016), though, continuously seeks to open academia to neurodiversity through instruction, research-creation, and research ‘dissemination’. This presentation continues the work of these authors by bringing these issues to field of educational research. We ask qualitative researchers to consider and experiment with various forms of research articulation that move with and beyond language. We also ask whether, how, and if, these neurodiverse modes of knowledge can/should be trans(re)lated.

Authors

• Anani M Vasquez, Arizona State University

• Csenge Kolozsvari