Neuroqueer(ing) Noise is my doctoral research-creation study. In this study, I experiment with affect theories to think about neurodiversity, music composition, and early childhood pedagogy: this study sits at the intersection of social practice art and empirical social science research to craft new techniques for researching-with sound-based methods and A/autistic practices. Drawing from critical disability studies, including crip and neuroqueer theories, and ‘post’ philosophies, I explore how neurodivergence comes to be formulated in the early childhood classroom at the intersection of racialising, abling/disabling, and Anglo-centric assemblages, challenging biocentric notions of A/autisms as residing ‘in’ a bounded body(mind) and the A/autist(ic) as a cohesive ‘type’ of person. At the same time, I keep hold of the valuable political work of A/autistic identity. I illustrate the generative friction between these perspectives with my stylised writing of A/autisms. In this thesis, I experiment with sound-based research and practice, through the process of music composition, audio recordings, and the sonified outputs of electrodermal activity devices (EDA): I explore the ethical and methodological challenges of researching with EDA in the classroom.
Related publications
Shannon, D. B., & Hackett, A. (2023). Opaque reciprocity: Or theorising Glissant’s ‘right to opacity’ as a communication praxis in early childhood education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. (Open Access)
Shannon, D. B. (2022). Perversity, precarity, and an embarrassment of (neuro)queer failures: Tracing a ‘more precise typology’ of the affects of failure and anxiety in an in-school research-creation project. Qualitative Studies in Education. (Open Access)
Shannon, D. B. (2022). ‘Trajectories matter’: Affect, neuroqueerness and music research-creation in an early childhood classroom. Qualitative Inquiry. (Open Access)
Shannon, D. B. (2021). A/autisms :: a ‘queer labor of the incommensurate’: Holding onto the friction between different orientations towards autism in an early childhood research-creation project. Qualitative Studies in Education. (Open Access)
Shannon, D. B. (2021). What do 'propositions' do for research-creation? Truth and modality in Whitehead and Wittgenstein. Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research. (Open Access)
Shannon, D. B. (2020). Neuroqueering Noise: Beyond ‘mere inclusion’ in a neurodiverse early childhood classroom. Canadian Journal of Disability Studies. (Open Access)
Shannon, D. B. (2019). ‘What could be feminist about sound studies?’: (in)Audibility in young children’s soundwalking. Journal of Public Pedagogies. (Open Access)