In Conversation With Erin Manning: A Refusal of Neurotypicality Through Attunements to Learning Otherwise

Abstract

This paper documents a conversation with Erin Manning in the first webinar of the series Doing Academica Differently: In conversation with Neuroatypicality. Drawing on her scholarship, teaching experience, as well as the more recent 3Ecologies project, Manning shows how systems serve to pathologize by framing difference from the angle of typicality and as a divergence from the norm. She argues, therefore, that it is necessary to move beyond the ontological presuppositions enacted by systems of whiteness/neurotypicality. She proposes that academic work must continue to remain open to the differential within difference, and value slow and convivial practices that texture qualities of existence as a mode rather than as gridded individual identities. By focusing on the crucial notion of value in higher education and how it might be reworked in experimental ways, Manning suggests ways of attuning for learning otherwise beyond a neurotypical frame.