I’m going to ask some big questions here. Think about whether you want to address them in your reading responses. If you do, my suggestion is to answer them with the help of passages from Silberman’s NeuroTribes.
- Is anybody neurotypical? What might it mean to be neurotypical?
- Did autism or Asperger’s syndrome exist before Kanner and Asperger named them? As you consider this question, keep in mind that autism takes many forms, that evidence suggests enormous genetic variation among people with autism, and the fact that while Asperger’s has become an identity for many people, it was removed from the most recent edition of the DSM–in favor of a range of “Autism Spectrum Disorder,” a diagnoses that can take various forms and understood in terms of degrees of dis/ability.
- How do representations of neurodivergence–in literature, film, in medicine, or neuroscience–shape our understanding of them? (Note: This is going to be the core of the prompt for your research projects.)
