Congratulations to Daniel Bendelman, currently studying for a PhD in Drama by Practice as Research, who has just contributed to a co-authored paper in the journal Disability & Society (Vol 34, 2019), entitled ‘Doing it Differently: Emancipatory Autism Studies Within a Neurodiverse Academic Space’.
Disability & Society is an international journal exploring issues such as human rights, discrimination, definitions, policy and practices. The article is part of a special issue on ‘Disability, Activism and the Academy: Time for Renewal?’ and Daniel contributed as part of a team of six authors.
In the current research climate, in which many autistic and autism communities are increasingly calling for a move towards collaborative forms of research, we consider how a loosely formed academic community may serve to challenge ‘business as usual’ in the university environment. Mindful of the need to move beyond theory, the authors use their experience to consider how knowledge about autism and neurotypicality can be meaningfully (co)-produced, and made available both to the research community and also to autistic and autism communities.
The article explores how autistic experience may trouble normative meanings of academic knowledge production. The authors also consider the limits and possibilities of a neurodiverse research collaboration to reflect on ways in which a loose epistemological space may serve to contribute to knowledge about both autism and neurotypicality, adding to debate around collaborative research.
The topic is related of Daniel’s PhD research, as his thesis title is provisionally ‘How Might the Use of PaR Methodologies within Critical Autism Studies Offer New Strategies of Cripping, Deconstructing, and Recreating the Production of Autism Narrative through Popular Media?’, supervised by Dr Shaun May.
To access the article online, please see the page here:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09687599.2019.1603102