On the Choreography of Neurodiversity

Blending theory, practice, and fascinating cultural vision, this week’s conversation with Erin Manning calls into question the systems and practices that keep us stuck.

Erin’s imagination and openness seem endless as she describes how we may work to create movements for other ways of being. Crucially, Erin describes her understanding of modalities of being, explaining that neurotypicality is a system that undergirds our ways of knowing and our ways of being a body. There is no singular “neurotypical person” just as there is no singular “neurodiverse” person. Rather, we are trained into a choreography that encourages us to “practice neurotypicality well” and punishes us if we do not.

Understanding the ways these systems work is vital as we untangle the hegemony and oppression that have dictated what counts as knowledge, what is valuable in a body, and even what bodies are “worth” being alive. The episode shares the resounding call that “we owe everything to each other.” How can we give into that call?

Erin’s work is grounded in scholarship on neurodiversity, Blackness, and ways of being that move outside of and beyond the status quo. In this episode, Erin shares her contemplations on the role of academia, her commitment to pedagogies that make space for creativity, her understanding of Autistic perception as a way of seeing life beyond neurotypical systems, and her musings on what life outside of “the logic of whiteness” could mean.

“It’s tempting to be anti-something, but that’s a hardening and I think in the hardening of it, you could miss out the minor gestures, the leaks, the reorientations, the openings. ”