Involuntary Attention as Creative Disruption: Meeting the Urban Wild with Neurodivergent Strategies
摘要
This chapter offers a contemplation on the implications of neurodiverse, more-than-human sociality for psychosocial studies. Drawing on my experience of doing auto/ethnographic research at Crossbones Graveyard (a burial ground and “wild” garden of remembrance in Southeast London) as a neurodivergentresearcher, I consolidate the proposition that neurodiverse sociality is already more-than-human sociality (Davidson & Smith, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27(5), 898–916, 2009; Judge, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36(6), 1101–1119, 2018). I offer passages of my open-field (Duncan, The Opening of the Field. New Directions, 1973) approach to auto/ethnography, an accidental path to materialising a neurodivergent strategy. Discussing these experiences in relation to neurotypically humanist paradigms of social science, I consider the specific responsibilities of psychosocial studies. What might taking on this responsibility mean for how we select and delimit “subject” matter, and for the processes by which we appraise ontological and epistemological coherence and intellectual “value”? Further, how can we create epistemological and institutional space for neurodiverse perspectives to multiply, including—and especially—those brought forth directly by neurodivergent people themselves?