Neurodiversity and Performance

Catalog description

This course will use the framework of performance studies to investigate the emerging concepts of neurodiversity and neurodivergence—terms originally developed by autistic activists and self-advocates seeking to depathologize autism and other forms of neurological, mental, and cognitive difference. Course materials will incorporate perspectives from theatre, performance, and other aesthetic modes in addition to theoretical and scholarly work from disability studies, the history of science, and cultural studies. We will also ask how social movements such as neurodiversity and mad pride have used performative strategies to contest and reformulate how we understand disability and neurological difference.