On this first full episode of Disorderly Voices, hosts Patrick Campbell and Maria Stuart are joined by Josh St. Pierre to discuss his article “The Construction of the Disabled Speaker: Locating Stuttering in Disability Studies.”
In this work Josh traces the origins of speech norms and how they are embedded within economic and social structures. Josh, Patrick, and Maria discuss his work within the broader context of disability studies, the relation between stammering and forms of oppression and what it means to develop solidarity among stammerers as a political community.
Speakers
Joshua St Pierre (PhD) is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta, Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Critical Disability Studies, and Principle Investigator of the Stuttering Commons. Dr. St. Pierre’s research seeks to make interventions on both theoretical and practical fronts. Working at the intersection of dysfluency studies, critical disability studies, and contemporary political theory, his research focuses on the interplay of communication and disability within information societies. His work also seeks to conceptualize and generate resources for radically accessible and hospitable communicative practices. His first monograph is titled Cheap Talk: Disability and the Politics of Communication, published by University of Michigan Press. He is an avid gardener.
Patrick Campbell is a stammerer, doctor and academic living in London, England. Patrick is an advocate for stammering and the rights of people who stammer. He co-edited the critically acclaimed book Stammering Pride and Prejudice and has contributed numerous blogs and articles on stammering. He has an interest in how public and self-stigma intertwine to produce disability for people who stammer and how this debilitating process can be altered through seeing positive value in stammering.
Maria Stuart is Assistant Professor in American Literature at University College Dublin where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and Crime Fiction. As a person who stammers, her recent research is in the emerging field of Dysfluency Studies (which has learnt much from the work of scholars and activists within Disability Studies). Her own work focuses on literary/cultural representations of stammering, the poetics of dysfluency, and rewriting cultural narratives of dysfluency. She was PI for Wellcome project: ‘Metaphoric Stammers and Embodied Speakers: connecting clinical, cultural and creative practice in the area of dysfluent speech’ (2019-2022), and is collaborator/co-director of Stuttering Commons (funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada).