Anna Stenning

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Toward a community-oriented research strategy

Routledge eBooks, Dec 19, 2023

Narrating the Many Autisms

Current issues: Neurodiversity studies: mapping out possibilities of a new critical paradigm

Being, Knowing, and Doing: Importing Theoretical Toolboxes for Autism Studies

Autism in adulthood, Mar 1, 2023

Cutting our own keys: New possibilities of neurodivergent storying in research

Autism

Increasingly, neurodivergent people are sharing their own narratives and conducting their own res... more Increasingly, neurodivergent people are sharing their own narratives and conducting their own research. Prominent individuals have integrated the ‘nothing about us without us’ slogan, used by neurodivergent and other disabled social activists, into academia. This article imagines a neuromixed academia. We consider how to work through challenges present in neuromixed encounters; to support cross-neurotype communication and pave the way for an ethos of community and collaboration. We explore how we might create a space in which neurodivergent experiences are seen as just one part of our complex and multifaceted identities. We do this through the process of ‘cutting our own keys’, to try out new possibilities of neurodivergent storying aimed at finding ourselves in our own stories about neurodivergence. This involves borrowing and developing methodological approaches formulated outside of research on different forms of neurodivergence, and to invent our own concepts based on our own em...

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Neurodiversity, Networks, and Narratives: Exploring Intimacy and Expressive Freedom in the Time of Covid‐19

Social Inclusion

The Narratives of Neurodiversity Network (NNN) is a neurodivergent academic, creative, and educat... more The Narratives of Neurodiversity Network (NNN) is a neurodivergent academic, creative, and educator collective that came together with allies during the Covid‐19 pandemic to create a network centred around emerging narratives about neuro-diversity and exploring new ways of learning and socialising. The network focuses on exploring the roles of written, spoken, and visual narratives across cultural locations about neuro‐atypical experiences in generating improved agency and self‐advocacy for those who have been subject to pathologization through neuro‐normativity and intersecting oppression. During the last year, widening access to digital platforms has provided a space to explore these issues outside of traditional academic spaces. We run a monthly “Salon,” our mixed‐media “reading, listening, and watching” group, in an effort to find positive representation within contemporary culture. Discussions have moved beyond mimesis and into a consideration of how narrative and storyworlds c...

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Chapter 7 Understanding Empathy Through a Study of Autistic Life Writing : On the Importance of Neurodiverse Morality

format_quoteEthical recognition of neurodivergence is essential for shaping funding and interventions, affecting societal perceptions of autism.format_quote

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Final Thesis Hardbound (1)

Introduction: European New Nature Writing // Introducción: Nueva escritura europea de la naturaleza

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2015

can remember being called a "nature writer" for the first time, and flinching at the implication ... more can remember being called a "nature writer" for the first time, and flinching at the implication that this was different from simply being a writer', wrote the longest established contemporary British nature writer, Richard Mabey in 1984 (Mabey, Clifford and King xi). Mabey's writing has always been concerned to engage with nature as both embedded throughout culture and materially challenging cultural forms and representations, so a category that marginalised his work on one side of an assumed binary seemed to defuse its cultural and political power. Although Jos Smith traces the earliest British usage of 'Nature-writing' to 1922, its contemporary sense is probably an import from the US. A newer generation of British writers, who are now aware of the American tradition of nature writing, retain Mabey's unease whilst recognising that they are part of a long Anglo-American tradition (Smith 6). "Nature writing is an unsatisfactory term," admits Cambridge academic and nature writer, Robert Macfarlane, "for this diverse, passionate, pluriform, reviving tradition-but it is the best there is, and it serves as a banner to march beneath" (Macfarlane, "Call of the Wild" n.p.). Here is a voice that seeks to shake off the escapist associations with a self-indulgent pastoral tradition carried by the term 'nature writing' in England (Gaelic and Celtic traditions are more complex) to revive a tradition with a new passion and with new, diverse, forms. This is a voice that has come to be characterised in Britain as 'new nature writing' that would include, for example, archipelagic literature, psychogeography, narrative scholarship and radical landscape poetry. Following our special edition of Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism on 'New Nature Writing' (17.1, Feb 2013), we were curious about what wider European developments in nature writing might be. But when we came to frame the call for papers for this special issue of Ecozon@ we found that 'nature writing' was not a category that translated easily in the rest of Europe. Indeed, the term 'pastoral' was often a cultural mode more associated with music than with literature. The lone writer, such as Robert Macfarlane, making trips into the countryside for personal epiphanies of engagement or enlightenment, often in dialogue with a writer from the past, was not a common mode of literary production in mainland Europe. So we called for "ecocritical essays that explored what has been happening in wider Europe in relation to new forms and modes of representations of nature in the arts, including non-fiction travel, memoir, landscape and nature writing, but also including fiction, ecopoetry, painting and land art." The

format_quoteRichard Kerridge urges new nature writing to critically examine conservative ideologies linking nature and environmentalism in response to the ecological crisis.format_quote

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Edward Thomas’s ‘Ecstasy’: An Unpublished Essay

Essays in Criticism, 2016

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Material ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2014, 376 pp., US$40 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-253-01398-9

Green Letters, 2016

systems have also created fossil economies. While incisively diagnosed, there is an absence of re... more systems have also created fossil economies. While incisively diagnosed, there is an absence of remedies. Nevertheless, this book broadly proves Malm’s point that a ‘geology not of mankind, but of capital accumulation ought to be rechristened “the Capitalocene”’ (391). Such a formidable body of historical evidence has the potential to ignite both ‘Victorian ecology’ and a more socially engaged ecocriticism.

The revolutionary urbanism of street farm: eco-anarchism, architecture and alternative technology in the 1970s

Green Letters, 2015

Stephen E Hunt has produced the definitive account of Street Farm (Graham Caine, Peter Crump and ... more Stephen E Hunt has produced the definitive account of Street Farm (Graham Caine, Peter Crump and Bruce Haggart), a London-based collective of anarchist architects working in the early 1970s. The three friends put together Street Farmer, an underground paper that, alongside mutating tower blocks, cosmic tractors and sprouting one-way signs, propagated ideas for the radical transformation of urban living which they called ‘revolutionary urbanism’. Taking inspiration from Situationism and social ecology, Street Farm offered a powerful vision of green cities in the control of ordinary people. As well as writing and drawing, the group took part in street activism and squatting, were exponents of autonomous housing and radical technology and became rock ’n’ roll architects, going on the road with multimedia slideshow presentations to a recorded soundtrack of music by the likes of John Lennon and Jefferson Airplane. In 1972 Caine built and designed ‘Street Farmhouse’ with Haggart and other friends. It hit national and international headlines as the first structure intentionally constructed as an ecological house, appearing on an early BBC documentary introduced by a youthful Melvin Bragg. While their fame was brief, their ongoing influence on prominent green architects including Howard Liddell, Brenda Vale and Robert Vale and Paul Downton has been more enduring.

An interview with Robert Macfarlane

Green Letters, 2013

No. Or rather, yes, if I am also allowed to consider myself to be at least attempting to produce ... more No. Or rather, yes, if I am also allowed to consider myself to be at least attempting to produce travel writing, natural history, documentary fiction, cultural history, chorography, biography, bio-geography, psychogeography, auto-biopsychogeography, deep topography, pastoral, post-pastoral, anti-pastoral, (regrettable) bouts of Baedeker, memoir, folklore, folk song, sub-shamanic paeans and pseudo-paeans, and embedded prose-poems whose style at times aspires to that of HD and other early modernists, but also to aspects of Pound’s Cantos, late-period Geoffrey Hill and middle-period Colin Simms ... By which pompous list I mean to say that writing of the kind in which I am interested is not, in fact, of a kind, but of many kinds, and I’m not sure that genre labels are especially helpful other than to animate a broader shared interest in cultural practice concerning landscape, nature, place, imagination, memory and ethics. Lawrence Buell points out in The Environmental Imagination, discussing ‘nature writing’ from Thoreau through to Dillard and Lopez, what a polyphonic spree of voices and techniques is (was) at work within these texts, and he – like the authors under discussion – relishes the hybrid nature of it all: a glorious gallimaufry (though one which of course can easily tend to mess and sludge, or brantub and pick ‘n’ mix), and necessary to the complications of nature-culture relations.

The search for a common ground between science and our ‘visionary images’ in Nature Cure by Richard Mabey and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

Green Letters, 2013

Nature Cure presents Richard Mabey's attempts to reconcile his passionate personal reflections wi... more Nature Cure presents Richard Mabey's attempts to reconcile his passionate personal reflections with a scientific perspective on human and non-human nature. This paper argues that Mabey finds an exemplar in Annie Dillard's classic of American nature literature, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It questions how Mabey can draw on Dillard's text without ignoring the complexities of local nature, and in doing so explores the implications of the British author's reconciliation with science. Arguing from the perspective of narrative scholarship, this paper proposes that Nature Cure can be understood as an appeal to our own imaginations rather than an objective presentation of the author's interdependencies with non-human nature. The paper addresses how, by examining the interpenetration of nature and culture in the artist's imagination, Nature Cure reminds us of our own cultural and imaginative relations with non-human nature. By focusing on particular renderings of sense perception in Mabey's text-principally vision-it is argued that Mabey's imaginative constructions are informed by local and global understandings. Through the aesthetic device of rendering, Mabey and Dillard show that sight is prone to error. This paper concludes that through his aesthetic presentations of contact with non-human nature, Richard Mabey reminds us of the imagination's central contribution to ethical and scientific reasoning.

format_quoteMabey’s work highlights imagination's critical role in ethical and scientific reasoning concerning human-nature relationships.format_quote

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Twentieth-century nature writing in Britain and Ireland

Green Letters, 2013

What exactly was new about the nature writing in Granta’s 2008 collection titled The New Nature W... more What exactly was new about the nature writing in Granta’s 2008 collection titled The New Nature Writing? One answer would be ‘not much’. Apart from Kathleen Jamie’s ‘Pathologies: A startling tour of our bodies’ much of the remaining writing followed a familiar pattern of the sensitive and informed individual’s encounter with nature. But this might be the response from a reader familiar with twentieth-century American nature writing. As several contributors to this issue discuss, in Britain and Ireland there has been a rather different tradition of nature writing – less spiritual and more concerned with natural history, perhaps less internally and more externally focused. Yet, recent British nature writers such as Robert Macfarlane are also clearly drawing upon the American tradition, as indicated in his interview in this issue. Another answer might be to remark upon the fact that Granta’s editor, Jason Cowley, found this writing to be new. British nature writing – archipelagic literature, biogeography, biopsychogeography and various newly named ‘subgenres’ – has been thriving in recent decades. It is true that writing about the British countryside and rural life dwindled in the midto-late twentieth century, perhaps due in part to critical association with sentimental escapism, or a lack of philosophical sophistication, while the international and urban travel narrative produced bumper crops. Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City (1973) gave permission for the blanket dismissal of pastoral writing which clouded the recognition of possible post-pastoral literature. And there are, indeed, problems intrinsic to the genre of nature writing. Edward Thomas, in his incarnation as a prose writer, described Beautiful Wales as ‘25,000 words of landscape, nearly all of it without humanity except what it may owe to a lanky shadow of myself’, ultimately finding poetry better suited to his personal encounters with non-human nature. Finding a structure for a series of narratives about the external environment is problematic. It runs the risk of sounding, to the sceptical British ear, inauthentic and stagy on the one hand, or indulgently personal and egocentric on the other. But besides the escapist and elitist tradition of British country literature critiqued by Williams, there has been a strand of writing about nature that has been radical, alternative and dissenting, as Kate Soper reminds us in her recent reconsideration of the Romantic tradition (2011). The strand of Romanticism which opposes positivism considers individual experience a vital component in any scientific account of external (or inner) nature. Hence that British scientifically informed nature writing with roots in a countryside writing tradition, that is shown to be flourishing in essays here by Alison Lacivita and Anna Stenning, or the environmentalist text, set out as a personal response to a crisis that is both personal and planetary, as Ben Smith indicates here. Jos Smith’s essay argues that there is no single history of a ‘nature writing’ genre. Smith indicates that Orage’s (1922) Readers and Writers: 1917–1921 has a chapter called ‘Nature writing in English literature’ and refers to Hudson and Jefferies as the finest Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2013 Vol. 17, No. 1, 1–4, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2012.750839

Misfits and ecological saints: strategies for non-normative living in autistic life writing

Disability Studies Quarterly

The historical construction of autism since the early 20th century has retained a focus on defici... more The historical construction of autism since the early 20th century has retained a focus on deficient 'interest in people, severe impairments in communication and bizarre responses to the environment' (DSM III). This means that he or she is represented as narcissistic and a-social rather than 'ecocentric', with an interest in the 'mechanical aspects of the environment'. Life writing by autistics including Chris Packham (2018) and Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay (2008) demonstrates an awareness that human experiences of the non-human world are intra-active and constantly changing (Alaimo 2010). Ironically, autistic writers who describe affinity with non-human nature are seen as having an innate (hence unreflective and naïve, in Schiller's sense) ecocentrism. This downplays the importance of experimental life writing by autistic authors which displays self-awareness and sensitivity to preconceptions about autism. Whether environmental discourse frames autistics a...

On the importance of neurodivergent morality

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Walking, Landscape and Environment

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Black Men Walking

Walking, Landscape and Environment, 2019

What to make of a Diminished Thing': Nature and Home in the Poetry of Edward Thomas and Robert Frost 1912-1917

Ecopoetry’ has been identified as a subset of nature poetry that proposes alternative modes of hu... more Ecopoetry’ has been identified as a subset of nature poetry that proposes alternative modes of human inhabitation on the earth, often by focusing on what it means to be at ‘at home’ in nature. This is linked to the ecocritical interest in place-making, as an alternative to the homogenized spaces of capitalism. And yet the idea of place as ‘home’ or shelter has been criticised for its conservatism, and for the ways it ignores the dynamic simultaneity of the planet. This has urged some critics to focus instead on poetic evocation of space. Here I argue that Thomas’s and Frost’s poetry of home and ‘extra-vagance’ between 1912 and 1917 suggests the dialectical connections between our homes and other spaces, places and times. At the same time, these concepts convey both the necessity and limits of language to suggest these experiences. This version of home is constantly seeking its antithesis, forming what Éduard Glissant called ‘rooted errantry’. While this idea is apparent prior to the...

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Anna Stenning

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