Neurodiversity, Networks, and Narratives: Exploring Intimacy and Expressive Freedom in the Time of Covid‐19

The Narratives of Neurodiversity Network (NNN) is a neurodivergent academic, creative, and educator collective that came together with allies during the Covid‐19 pandemic to create a network centred around emerging narratives about neurodiversity and exploring new ways of learning and socialising. The network focuses on exploring the roles of written, spoken, and visual narratives across cultural locations about neuro‐atypical experiences in generating improved agency and self‐advocacy for those who have been subject to pathologization through neuro‐normativity and intersecting oppression. During the last year, widening access to digital platforms has provided a space to explore these issues outside of traditional academic spaces. We run a monthly “Salon,” our mixed‐media “reading, listening, and watching” group, in an effort to find positive representation within contemporary culture. Discussions have moved beyond mimesis and into a consideration of how narrative and storyworlds can question the supposed naturalness of certain ways of being in and perceiving the world. This article interrogates the network’s core principles of nonhierarchical co‐production, including the roles of creativity, community, identity, and emancipatory research which were animated by the new techno‐social context. We consider the cultural lives of neurodiversity in the West and beyond, including ethical and aesthetic dimensions. We share a faith in the power of storytelling to inform new social identities for neurodivergent people and to inform scientific understandings of atypical cognition. In exploring this, we speak through a porous first‐person plural narrator, to unsettle the idea that there is a hegemonic “we” speaking on behalf of all neurodivergent people

Unwriting Victorian illiteracy

This thesis demonstrates that the representations of illiteracy in Victorian fiction often called into question the absolutism of and motivations behind the contemporary drive for universal literacy. In the texts I examine here, low-level literacy functions as a means of resistance against oppressive class and educational hierarchies. The original contribution to knowledge that this thesis makes is a reconfiguration of the supposed primacy of literacy in nineteenth-century fictional representations concerned with educational progress. It demonstrates that across the nineteenth century, there was a hitherto-underdiscussed ambivalence in fiction regarding the dominance of textuality, with writers often criticising texts’ domineering authority while seeking to hold open spaces for other, increasingly subaltern forms of knowledge-making and understanding. In response to Samuel Johnson’s 1755 definition of illiteracy – ‘unlettered; untaught; unlearned; unenlightened by science’ – and the (mis)perception of illiteracy as inevitably being a deficit, the thesis is structured around four forms of illiterate representation that utilise the ‘un-’ prefix. The chapters are arranged chronologically to give a sense of the general progression of illiterate representation in relation to significant shifts in educational policy, public attitudes, and increasing literacy rates. The first chapter – The Unlearned ¬– identifies a contemporary alternative to the semi-literate criminal trope in 1830s fiction: the semi-literate footman. I argue that while footmen figures are often morally ambivalent, their low-level literacy functions as a powerful vehicle for exposing upper-class hypocrisies. The footmen in early Victorian texts gain both their critical lens and their individual agency through their atypical literacy. However, these traits are pre-emptively quashed by the exploitative teaching practices seen in mid-century fiction. The second chapter – The Untaught – focuses on the numerous scenes of literacy training that appeared in fiction published in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. This chapter demonstrates how the power dynamics of the reading lesson are used to control the intellectual and sexual development of learners. It pays particular attention to gendered dynamics, discussing the patronisation of male learners and the subjugation of female learners within the commonly employed ambivalences of the pedagogical marriage plot. The thesis then shifts focus from the actions of predatory pedagogues to the disciplinary power of text. In chapter three – The Underestimated – I introduce the figure of the ‘idiot reader’, an intellectually disabled figure found in several sensation novels whose atypical literacy renders them attuned to the numerous dangers posed by the written word. The final chapter – The Unorthodox – focuses on depiction of alternative forms of reading and orthography that challenge the universalist discourses of the education reform agenda in the decades after the 1870 Education Act. These readings of illiterate agency found in nineteenth-century fiction culminate in the conclusion of my thesis – The Unwriting. This final analysis is delivered unscripted via voice recording and reflects upon the primacy of written forms of communication over alternative means of intellectual expression within the contemporary academy

Killing the Letter: Alternate Literacies and Orthographic Distortions in Jude the Obscure

When Jude the Obscure (1895) was published as a single volume novel, Hardy added the biblical epithet ‘the letter killeth’ to the title page. In Jude and across his works, Hardy revels in moments in which literacy seems to undo itself. This article traces Hardy’s attempts to ‘kill the letter’ through non-standard engagements with orthography as part of a larger proto-modernist approach that destabilizes the fixity of meaning. There are several concerns linked to the growing primacy of literacy that appear time and again in Hardy’s novels, specifically: the alternative literacies of the lesser educated, semiotic multiplicities, and the transformative potential of spelling mistakes. I suggest that Hardy’s treatment of these themes demonstrates a sustained effort to ‘kill the letter’ and challenge the assumption of progress made by the various educational reforms that had taken place in the latter half of the nineteenth century

Neurodiversity, Networks, and Narratives: Exploring Intimacy and Expressive Freedom in the Time of Covid‐19

The Narratives of Neurodiversity Network (NNN) is a neurodivergent academic, creative, and educator collective that came together with allies during the Covid‐19 pandemic to create a network centred around emerging narratives about neuro-diversity and exploring new ways of learning and socialising. The network focuses on exploring the roles of written, spoken, and visual narratives across cultural locations about neuro‐atypical experiences in generating improved agency and self‐advocacy for those who have been subject to pathologization through neuro‐normativity and intersecting oppression. During the last year, widening access to digital platforms has provided a space to explore these issues outside of traditional academic spaces. We run a monthly “Salon,” our mixed‐media “reading, listening, and watching” group, in an effort to find positive representation within contemporary culture. Discussions have moved beyond mimesis and into a consideration of how narrative and storyworlds can question the supposed naturalness of certain ways of being in and perceiving the world. This article interrogates the network’s core principles of nonhierarchical co‐production, including the roles of creativity, community, identity, and emancipatory research which were animated by the new techno‐social context. We consider the cultural lives of neurodiversity in the West and beyond, including ethical and aesthetic dimensions. We share a faith in the power of storytelling to inform new social identities for neurodivergent people and to inform scientific understandings of atypical cognition. In exploring this, we speak through a porous first‐person plural narrator, to unsettle the idea that there is a hegemonic “we” speaking on behalf of all neurodivergent people