Please join us at 2.30pm on Wednesday 4th February both in-person and online for our final English Research Seminar of Trimester 2. Please contact Prof. Scott Thurston for more details.
Reflections from a Monograph in Progress: Reimagining Madness, Motherhood, and Disability: From Fairy Tales to Disney and Beyond
Dr Hannah Helm (Salford)
In this exploratory presentation, I discuss the ongoing process of (attempting to!) write my monograph (in progress with Liverpool University Press), which is provisionally entitled Reimagining Madness, Motherhood, and Disability: From Fairy Tales to Disney and Beyond. The book newly argues that key works of nineteenth-century children’s literature, fairy tales, and twenty-first-century Disney film mobilise feminist, anti-sanist, and anti-ableist representations of mad and disabled women in order to challenge feminine, maternal, and patriarchal norms. Employing cutting-edge methodologies from Mad Studies and Disability Studies, the book pioneers original reading strategies that have broader applicability to the analysis of madness and disability in Children’s Literature and film scholarship. Delving into the literary and filmic works of Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and Disney, the book explores how these timeless tales continue to resonate in our contemporary moment by revealing counterintuitive and alternative emancipatory possibilities for female agency and empowerment. In doing so, the book offers strength-based readings by implementing new ways of thinking about these texts and topics in an intersectionally feminist, post-MeToo, disability rights, and Mad Pride twenty-first-century era.
An Introduction to the field of Critical Autism Studies
Alex Burke (PhD Candidate, Salford)
Since its emergence in the mid twentieth century, autism research has been largely deficit-driven, conducted with a clear power discrepancy between researcher and participant. The harmful ideas and misunderstandings formed from decades of pathological study have caused real world harm to autistic people. Whilst conversations in wider society are slowly changing, academic research falls behind, often still upholding these same harmful factors. The interdisciplinary field of Critical Autism Studies (CAS) was conceived by Davidson and Orsini in 2011 as an effort to combat these issues by promoting three core principles: exploring the power structures that shape autism studies, advancing new, enabling narratives of autism, and a commitment to develop inclusive, non-reductive analytical frameworks. This neuro-affirming talk will explore how CAS may be used as a lens for performing intersectional literary analysis, and what may be gained for the autistic community through doing so.