Composing Kin: Teaching Neurodivergent History through Community-Engaged Art
Alexis Riley, Assistant Professor of Theatre & Dance at the University of Michigan, presents the first in an ongoing series of webinars on neurodiversity in the arts.
Historical sites associated with neurodivergence are often painful, characterized by isolation and exclusion. From institutions to alternative schools, these locales—and the carceral histories they cite—are often obscured in our current landscape, transformed into luxury apartments, shopping districts, and city parks. This obfuscation presents neurodivergence as a contemporary phenomenon, one wholly detached from its broader historical context. How might the arts help us to render that context more perceptible, offering access to neurodivergent pasts while imagining neurodivergent futures?
In this webinar, neurodivergent artist Alexis Riley introduces attendees to kinsong: ode to disability ancestors. Crafted alongside a team of over 20 neurodiverse undergraduate and graduate students, kinsong served as a belated memorial to the roughly 2,000 people buried in the Austin State Hospital Cemetery—their graves unmarked and remains unclaimed, likely due to ableism. Throughout the process of creating kinsong, Riley and her collaborators used their bodies to draw attention to the site, prompting passersby to pause and engage the cemetery located (in some cases, literally) in their backyards. At the same time, it also offered the community an opportunity to interrogate their own relationship to that history—and the responsibilities that may result.
Blending media from the performance with resources for creative engagement, this webinar ultimately offers neurodivergent and neurotypical attendees alike a framework for engaging arts-based approaches to neurodivergent histories in a range of settings.
