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In 1936, at age nineteen, Dorothea Buck followed the trail of a star along the mudflats of her North Sea home, Wangerooge Island. Hospitalized at a Christian institution called Bethel, she was sterilized under Nazi law upon a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Buck lost her lifelong dream of becoming a teacher—the sterilized could not get a college degree. Instead, she became an artist and activist. Buck, who lived to the age of 102, fought throughout her life for psychiatric reform. She created her own form of psychiatric treatment, which she called “trialogue,” in which psychosis experiencers, family, and clinicians join together to examine the experience of psychosis. Trialogue seminars still take place today. Buck also demanded recognition of the Nazi murders of the disabled and the mentally ill. Many of these victims were psychiatric patients gassed in chambers built into six of Germany’s asylums. In 2008, Buck told an audience commemorating these murders that there must be “no second-class victims” of Nazi rule. Biologically based psychiatry, Buck believed, would always reduce a condition like hers to something “genetically caused, meaningless, and incurable.” Like fellow German Paul Schreber’s Memoirs, Buck’s On the Trail of the Morning Star calls for a radical rethinking of what it means to live with and in psychosis. This publication is the first time one of her major writings appears in English.

For over four decades, Ruskin Mill Trust has worked with young people with special educational needs and behavioural issues who learn traditional crafts and organic farming as part of an integrated curriculum of therapeutic education, overcoming barriers to learning and re-engaging with the wider world. This accessible and inspiring book showcases how an appreciation of place, traditional crafts, farming and transformative education offers a wider route to human well-being for all. The authors outline the different fields of the “Practical Skills Therapeutic Education” method, which includes developing practical skills, learning the ecology of the farm and understanding therapeutic education, holistic care, health and self-leadership. Taking the reader on a tour of Ruskin Mill’s many extraordinary provisions across Britain, and going deeper in conversation with its founder, Aonghus Gordon, this book is an outstanding story of creative thinking in an age of narrow focus on classrooms and written examinations, presenting a transformative perspective on education and care. Being grounded in work supporting young people with complex additional needs, it provides a rare insight into the work of one of the world’s leading charities working with neurodiversity. With its non-specialist language, Place, Craft and Neurodiversity offers ideas and resources for work in different areas of education and therapy. It will inspire parents, educators and care workers around the globe.

In Open Book in Ways of Water, poet and artist Adam Wolfond explores the synaesthetic quality of autistic perception, the way in which water in its different materializations shapes and channels language. Building on notions such as “wetness,” “streams,” and “currents,” Wolfond constructs a linguistic universe in which writing and perception merge, move, and “pace to gether” – echoing both the togetherness of the senses and the gathering rhythms of water. Open Book in Ways of Water is as much a book of poetry and a book about poetry, a self-reflection in an endlessly moving and transforming element. As the author himself explains: Language is a way to understand each other but it is also reductive in the ways that it is abstracted and non-sensuous, and open writing as movement tends to be ignored as autistics are forced into neurotypical ways of seeing, and the thinking around artistic practices feels of a pace that intensifies the use of forms forming, and similarities with open processes are languaging the way of water, making language about artful relations with the more than human. Water is a game of ways and patterns that wave and ripple and can pull us under, the talk is about surfacing but languaging is about feeling, moving the ways that it makes are having variances moving the thresholds in thinking feeling of a rally that comes from cutting the grammars out and that is the way of perception that is cut by grammar and people need art to dance this dance of relation. A man of autism answers the ways of the body much of the time and that means my body rallies the artful atmospheres that are dancing me and the real feeling can dance the atmospheres as my body presence and pace shifts other bodies to be free. Having a ticcing body is making the dance about disorder but really it is about a different and diverse way of languaging with many feelings and bathing and immersing and I don’t have any other way.

Neurodiversity in the Workplace presents a timely and needed perspective on the role and responsibility of employers and those working to increase the effectiveness of workplace practices to examine the many ways we preclude large segments of the population from employment; minimizing opportunities for building a truly inclusive work environment. This collection provides an opportunity to look at how discrimination can occur across the employment process and what can be done to minimize the exclusionary practices that prevent neurodiverse individuals from getting into the workplace, advancing, thriving, and contributing as each of us desires to do. With expertise from leading professionals, this book provides a holistic look at the application of leadership theories in a neurodiverse context and how the workplace can be adapted to accommodate for neurodiverse employees. This book also explores effective recruitment strategies by looking into applicant screening as well as interviewing and selection, adapting internal organizational resources to a neurodiverse workforce, and legal and regulatory environment considerations for autism hiring programs. Each chapter provides an overview of existing knowledge on effective workplace inclusion practices across the employment process, specific implications of research to date for a more neurodiversity-inclusive workplace, and what future research is needed to further inform these practices. This volume is intended to increase awareness about the challenges and opportunities in making the workplace more neurodiversity-inclusive, making it instrumental for I/O and other psychologists. This book is also crucial for management and business consultants; employers; diversity, equity, and inclusion specialists; human resource professionals; and others interested in neurodiversity inclusion more broadly.

Summary: This book opens with a discussion of neurodiversity and an elaboration of the diagnosis of autism. It then examines factors correlating with autism, including sex bias, month of birth, migration and impact of infant feeding. The next section is on the impact of autism. The neurobiology and genetic section deals with epigenetics and intracellular pathways associated with etiology. The development and behaviour section deals with proprioceptive profiles and joint attention in autism. The final section focuses on interventions including mindfulness, animal assisted activity, social/cultural perspective on autism intervention and physical activity. The book is relevant to all professionals and researchers working with persons with autism, including psychiatrists/psychologists, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, teachers, nurses and care workers.

In Hidden Depths, Professor Penny Spikins explores how our emotional connections have shaped human ancestry. Focusing on three key transitions in human origins, Professor Spikins explains how the emotional capacities of our early ancestors evolved in response to ecological changes, much like similar changes in other social mammals. For each transition, dedicated chapters examine evolutionary pressures, responses in changes in human emotional capacities and the archaeological evidence for human social behaviours. Starting from our earliest origins, in Part One, Professor Spikins explores how after two million years ago, movement of human ancestors into a new ecological niche drove new types of collaboration, including care for vulnerable members of the group. Emotional adaptations lead to cognitive changes, as new connections based on compassion, generosity, trust and inclusion also changed our relationship to material things. Part Two explores a later key transition in human emotional capacities occurring after 300,000 years ago. At this time changes in social tolerance allowed ancestors of our own species to further reach out beyond their local group and care about distant allies, making human communities resilient to environmental changes. An increasingly close relationship to animals, and even to cherished possessions, appeared at this time, and can be explained through new human vulnerabilities and ways of seeking comfort and belonging. Lastly, Part Three focuses on the contrasts in emotional dispositions arising between ourselves and our close cousins, the Neanderthals. Neanderthals are revealed as equally caring yet emotionally different humans, who might, if things had been different, have been in our place today. This new narrative breaks away from traditional views of human evolution as exceptional or as a linear progression towards a more perfect form. Instead, our evolutionary history is situated within similar processes occurring in other mammals, and explained as one in which emotions, rather than ‘intellect’, were key to our evolutionary journey. Moreover, changes in emotional capacities and dispositions are seen as part of differing pathways each bringing strengths, weaknesses and compromises. These hidden depths provide an explanation for many of the emotional sensitivities and vulnerabilities which continue to influence our world today.

In 1994, at the age of twenty-five, when the “terrible brokenness that comes with sexual assault” was folded deep within her body and thoughts of suicide were always close by, Erin Manning wrote The Perfect Mango at an almost feverish pitch: nineteen chapters in nineteen days, a sort of self-rescue operation, where writing became a form of making (and feeling) life otherwise. Throughout those nineteen days, and although not able to fully articulate it to herself at the time, Manning wrote her way into a “composition that asks how else life might be lived.” And in the rhythms of that composition, which was also a living, Manning was, and is, able to refuse the category and norm and stillness of “victim” (while still understanding the inheritances of violence) in order to follow instead the more-than-I as well as the joy of the “more-than of experience in the making.” Twenty-five years later, Manning allows these earlier writings to find their way back into the world, which is also a way of giving “voice to those moments of messy survival” while also asking us, who share in (and help to bear) those moments as readers, to consider “other ways of listening to the urgency that is living.” To (re)publish the book now is to give it a place in the world in a way that honors its force as something that is always beyond anyone’s claim to it, even Manning’s. In this sense, The Perfect Mango invites us, with Manning, to be in excess of ourselves, and also to consider, in Manning’s words, “how to create conditions for living beyond humanism’s fierce belief that we, the privileged, the neurotypicals, the as-yet-unscathed, the able-bodied, hold the key to all perspectives in the theatre of living.” Ultimately, The Perfect Mango and Manning’s reflections on its composition ask us to consider living “in the fierce celebration of a world invented by those modes of life which tear at the colonial, white, neurotypical fabric of life as we know it.”

"In 1994, at the age of twenty five years old, when the terrible “shattering that comes with the sexual assault ”doubled deep into her body and thoughts of suicide were always around, Erin Manning wrote The Perfect Manga on a almost feverish state: nineteen chapters in nineteen days, a kind self-rescue operation where writing has become a way of make (and feel) life in another way. Over these nineteen days, and although not able to fully articulate to herself at the time, Manning was written inside “a composition that asks what otherwise life could be lived. ” And in the rhythms of this composition, which was also a life, Manning was and is able to decline the category and norm and immobility of the “victim” (while still understanding the inheritances violence) in order to follow the more-than-myself as well as the joy of “more than experience” Twenty-five years Manning later allows these earlier writings to find their way around the world, which is a way of giving “voice to these confused survival times ”while also asking us to we share (and help support) such moments as readers, that we consider “other ways of listening to the urgency of living”. Republishing the book now is giving it a place in the world in a way that honor your strength as something that is always beyond the claim of anyone, even from Manning. In this sense, The Perfect Manga invites us, with Manning, to be in excess of ourselves, and also to consider, in Manning's words, “as create conditions for living beyond the fierce belief of humanism that we, the privileged, the neurotypical, the still unscathed, the capable bodies, is that we hold the key to all perspectives in the theater of life ”. Finally, Manning Perfect Manga and Manning's reflections on its composition ask us to consider “living in the fierce celebration of a world invented by these ways of life that tear the white, neurotypical colonial fabric of life as the We know."", "Em 1994, aos vinte e cinco anos de idade, quando o terrível “despedaçamento que vem com a agressão sexual” dobrou-se profundamente em seu corpo e pensamentos de suicídio estavam sempre por perto, Erin Manning escreveu A Manga Perfeita num estado quase febril: dezenove capítulos em dezenove dias, uma espécie de operação de auto-resgate, onde a escrita tornou-se uma maneira de fazer (e sentir) a vida de outra forma. Ao longo desses dezenove dias, e embora não capaz de articular completamente para si mesma na época, Manning escreveu-se para dentro “de uma composição que pergunta de que outra forma a vida poderia ser vivida”. E nos ritmos dessa composição, que era também uma vida, Manning foi e é capaz de recusar a categoria e norma e imobilidade da “vítima” (enquanto ainda compreende as heranças da violência) a fim de seguir em vez disso o mais-que-eu assim como a alegria do “mais-que da experiência no fazer” Vinte e cinco anos depois, Manning permite que esses escritos anteriores encontrem seu caminho de volta ao mundo, o que é uma maneira de dar “voz a esses momentos de sobrevivência confusos” enquanto também pede a nós, que compartilhamos (e ajudamos a suportar) tais momentos enquanto leitores, que consideremos “outras formas de escutar a urgência que é viver”. Republicar o livro agora é dar-lhe um lugar no mundo de uma maneira que honre sua força como algo que está sempre além da reivindicação de qualquer um, mesmo de Manning. Nesse sentido, A Manga Perfeita nos convida, com Manning, a estar em excesso de nós mesmos, e também a considerarmos, nas palavras de Manning, “como criar condições para viver além da crença feroz do humanismo de que nós, os privilegiados, os neurotípicos, os ainda incólumes, os corpos-capazes, é que guardamos a chave para todas as perspectivas no teatro da vida”. Por fim, A Manga Perfeita e as reflexões de Manning a respeito de sua composição pedem que consideremos “viver na feroz celebração de um mundo inventado por esses modos de vida que rasgam o tecido colonial, branco, neurotípico da vida como a conhecemos.”"

Ralph James Savarese showcases the voices of autistic readers by sharing their unique insights into literature and their sensory experiences of the world, thereby challenging common claims that people with autism have a limited ability to understand language, to partake in imaginative play, and to generate the complex theory of mind necessary to appreciate literature.

"What is autism and where has it come from? Increased diagnostic rates, the rise of the 'neurodiversity' movement, and growing autism journalism, have recently fuelled autism's fame and controversy. The metamorphosis of autism is the first book to explain our fascination with autism by linking it to a longer history of childhood development. Drawing from a staggering array of primary sources, Bonnie Evans traces autism back to its origins in the early twentieth century and explains why the idea of autism has always been controversial and why it experienced a 'metamorphosis' in the 1960s and 1970s. Evans argues that changes in the way that we observe, understand and think about child development have fuelled reported increases in autism and led to current debates about neurodiversity. She explains how 'the first autism' of the early twentieth century spawned a new industry of child psychology focused on ego development and human relations. It was only after the closure of 'mental deficiency' institutions in the late 1950s that autism took on new meanings as an epidemiological entity. This enabled the 'metamorphosis' of autism and turned it into the phenomenon that we all know today. Evans takes the reader on a journey of discovery from the ill-managed wards of 'mental deficiency' hospitals, to high powered debates in the houses of parliament, and beyond. The study explains how children's rights and psychological models of autism have always been inextricably linked, and why this should make us reconsider how we think about autism. This book will appeal to a wide market of scholars and others interested in autism, neurodiversity and how this relates to wider theories of children's psychological development."

Building on work in feminist studies, queer studies and critical race theory, this volume challenges the universality of propositions about human nature, by questioning the boundaries between predominant neurotypes and ‘others’, including dyslexics, autistics and ADHDers. This is the first work of its kind to bring cutting-edge research across disciplines to the concept of neurodiversity. It offers in-depth explorations of the themes of cure/prevention/eugenics; neurodivergent wellbeing; cross-neurotype communication; neurodiversity at work; and challenging brain-bound cognition. It analyses the role of neuro-normativity in theorising agency, and a proposal for a new alliance between the Hearing Voices Movement and neurodiversity. In doing so, we contribute to a cultural imperative to redefine what it means to be human. To this end, we propose a new field of enquiry that finds ways to support the inclusion of neurodivergent perspectives in knowledge production, and which questions the theoretical and mythological assumptions that produce the idea of the neurotypical. Working at the crossroads between sociology, critical psychology, medical humanities, critical disability studies, and critical autism studies, and sharing theoretical ground with critical race studies and critical queer studies, the proposed new field – neurodiversity studies – will be of interest to people working in all these areas.