On Thursday, May 8 during Club Hours in Center for the Arts (Building 1P) Lecture Hall, Sinchin Chatterjee will speak on “Deconstructing Normalcy: Autistic Writing as a Challenge to Neuro-normativity.”
In this talk, Chatterjee analyzes autistic life-writing in order to examine how literary representations from the neurological margins offer an alternative imagination of selfhood. Using theoretical frameworks from disability/neurodiversity studies, Chatterjee explores how autistic utterances resist and “crip” the ableist notions of normalcy and expose the construct of neuro-normativity. Presenting an autoethnographic account of growing up in an autistic household in the suburbs of a developing nation in the Global South lacking any constructive discourse around autism, Chatterjee discusses the phenomenon of autistic masking and highlights the importance of advocacy and activism in deconstructing the ableist, biomedical discourse of neurotypicality.
Sinchan Chatterjee is a Fulbright Visiting Researcher in the English Department at UC Berkeley and a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Bombay, India. Chatterjee is currently working on his doctoral dissertation, which is a critical study of autistic writing. He has globally presented his work on autism and neurodivergence, and his works have been published by Palgrave Macmillan, SUNY Press, Penguin India, and other leading publishers.
By the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences
