ERIN MANNING on the Choreography of Neurodiversity /356
Vibrant photo of bark beetle patterns by Tim Xallan.
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. ”
Photo of Erin Manning
Erin Manning grounds in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics and politics. Pedagogical experiments are central to her work, some of which occur at Concordia University in Montreal where she is a research chair in Speculative Pragmatism, Art and Pedagogy in the Faculty of Fine Arts. She is concerned, always, about alter-pedagogical and alter-economic practices. She has written The Minor Gesture, For a Pragmatics of the Useless, Out of the Clear, and The Being of Relation (forthcoming).
Her artwork is textile-based, relationally-oriented, and often participatory. Her current research is focused on 3e —an exploration of the transversality of the three ecologies, the social, the environmental and the conceptual.
♫ The music in this episode is “Beilsteinerstrasse” by Johanna Knutsson courtesy of Patience Records.
Episode References
Metamorphoses of the Body — University of Minnesota Press
Relationscapes by Erin Manning
Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay | Disability Studies Quarterly
Cedric J. Robinson - Pluto Press
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For The Wild Podcast is an anthology of the Anthropocene; focused on land-based protection, co-liberation and intersectional storytelling rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth and consumerism.