�鶹��Ѱ�����

Over the last decade, I have been working with students and colleagues to bring the topic of neurodiversity more centrally into sociocultural linguistic inquiry. Understood as the range of variation in cognitive, sensory, affective, and embodied domains, neurodiversity has until recently primarily been understood through medical frameworks, and has been otherwise a marginal topic in linguistic theory. Ayden Parish and I counter this view in our article and special issue "Toward a Neurodiverse Sociocultural Linguistics," forthcoming in Language in Society. The collaboration joins the neurodiversity movement in asserting the socially embedded and meaningful nature of behaviors normatively understood as pathological. Our introduction to the special issue asserts a two-pronged approach, whereby analysis of neurodivergent communicative practices can enrich and expand sociocultural linguistic theory, and conversely, academic scholarship can inform the broader study of neurodiversity and improve the lives of neurodivergent people. We argue that attention to neurodiversity promises to reconfigure core assumptions in sociocultural linguistics and account for a fuller understanding of social meaning.

My interest in challenging the predominantly cognitive focus of much mental health research stems from earlier collaborations with cultural anthropologist Donna Goldstein. Our 2015 article Mass Hysteria in Le Roy, New York: How Brain Experts Materialized Truth and Outscienced Environmental Inquiry, published in American Ethnologist, provides a social critique of discourses surrounding an alleged case of mass hysteria in an area known for extreme forms of environmental toxicity. Teenage schoolgirls in Le Roy, New York captured the attention of the US public in 2011 and 2012 when they developed acute motor and vocal tics. Drawing from perspectives in medical and linguistic anthropology, we interrogate how the diagnosis of “mass psychogenic illness” came to be favored over attribution to a potential environmental cause. For example, neurologists countered the evidential vagueness of environmental claims by suggesting that material proof of psychological origin could lie in fMRI data. In addition, they framed the girls' highly attuned social interactions, shared speech patterns, and empathy as the neurological opposite of autism, mapping them onto a pathologized model of contagion. In sum, our paper demonstrates how institutional neurological diagnoses can be weaponized to enforce conformity, dismiss environmental realities, and reinforce gender and class biases.

My current research focuses on the social life of autism, particularly in regard to what scholars have observed as the unique "intonation pattern" of persons on the autism spectrum. In a forthcoming paper, Ayden Parish and I analyze the adoption of what autistic individuals often discuss as "foreign," "non-local," or "autistic accents" – that is, language varieties typically associated with chronotypes other than the individual’s place of origin. The participants in our study articulate a complex and sometimes strained relationship with the indexical linkages that neurotypical speakers often experience as “natural” and “self-evident.” By importing into their own speech practices widely circulating semiotic bundles, as found in the time-space-personhood linkages carried through enregistered accents, autistic individuals may come to successfully navigate conversations where they might otherwise struggle with the (neurotypical) turn-by-turn interaction order. Our paper highlights the indexical complexity of autistic masking in everyday conversation, highlighting the need to incorporate neurodiverse perspectives into sociocultural linguistics. We argue that masking is best understood as a higher indexical order — per Silverstein (2003a) — one in which ideologically driven indexical connections are reflexively taken up as interactional resources.The paper is forthcoming in The Total Linguistic Fact: Linguistic Anthropology in the Wake of Michael Silverstein.

At �鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder, I have worked to establish the Autistic Life and Language (ALL) Project, a research community of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. The ALL Project evolved from research and teaching initiatives on language and neurodiversity developed between the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Anthropology, including several small-grant research projects, Studio Lab participation, a graduate seminar on “Neurodiversity in Sociocultural Linguistics,” and an undergraduate honors course on "Autism in Language and Social Life." Our weekly lab meetings and frequent event participation endeavors provide a friendly, supportive, idea-inspired learning environment for researchers at all levels, many of whom identify as neurodivergent or are involved in neurodiverse advocacy. Our research team explores autism through the lens of neurodiversity theory and its associated activist movements, emphasizing the communicative and sociocultural experiences of autistic individuals in everyday life. Moving beyond dominant medical (deficit-based) frameworks, we approach life on the spectrum through the exploration of humanizing research found in the fields of cultural anthropology, sociocultural linguistics, and critical autism/neurodiversity studies.