18.108 neurodiversity

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 108.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Wed, 04 Aug 2004 08:37:17 +0100
         From: "Kathleen Seidel" <kathleen_at_superluminal.com>
         Subject: Re: 17.775 ancient Greek word formation? metaphorical autism?

[Members of Humanist may recall that some time ago I made an enquiry about
non-medical uses of the word "autism", as in Peter Wegner's slogan
"Algorithms are autistic!" At the time I was unaware of the more generously
minded perspective of the "neurodiversity" movement, the history of
metaphorical uses of the word "autism", the misunderstanding of autism
embedded in those uses and so the possibilities of offense. The following
just arrived in response to my initial posting. I am grateful to Ms Seidel
for the alert to some very interesting material. --WM]

Dear Dr. McCarty,

I read with interest your post to the Humanist Discussion Group which I
found on the archive page:
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v17/0779.html
(I am not a member of the list.)

May I recommend an article on this subject:
Metaphors of Autism, and Autism as Metaphor: An Exploration of
Representation, by Mitzi Waltz
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/mso/hid/hid2/hid03pap/waltz%20paper.pdf

I would also like to welcome you to visit http://www.neurodiversity.com, a
comprehensive meta-site on all aspects of autism. It is my hope that the
site will prove useful to university students and researchers, as well as
to the general public. I have made a special effort to identify
autobiographical accounts of spectrum-dwellers (over 230 so far), and to
comprehensively scan the web for peer-reviewed journal
articles on autism and related conditions and concerns. The Sociology of
Disability, Language Awareness, and Offended Yet? pages include examples of
the use of "autism" and "autistic" as metaphors, and of disparaging
references to autistic persons in popular discourse.

If you have learned of any other interesting online resources on this
topic, I would love to hear of them. And if you should ever publish a paper
or book on the subject, I would very much appreciate being notified of its
availability.

Best regards,

Kathleen Seidel
neurodiversity.com | honoring the variety of human wiring
http://www.neurodiversity.com
Received on Wed Aug 04 2004 - 04:08:51 EDT