How should stuttering look in text? Can representations of stuttering in written form reflect its spontaneity and variety?
Host Patrick Campbell is joined by Chris Constantino and artist Conor Foran to discuss how Conor’s final project in art school led him to a decade-long project in creating a typeface, Dysfluent Mono, that represents stuttering. Conor explains how the font tries to escape stereotypical references of stuttering and his journey to publishing the magazine Dysfluent, which uses the font.
Speakers
Conor Foran is an Irish artist and designer based in London. He runs a socially engaged design practice with his partner Bart Rzeznik called Take Courage. They combine creativity, technology and strong relationships with their collaborators to design printed matter, develop websites and manage projects for education, care and culture—including Stuttering Commons. As a proud person who stammers, Conor is interested in how disability intersects with creativity and how art and design can instigate social change. He leads a collaborative, creative practice about stammering called Dysfluent.
Christopher Constantino, OFS, lives in Tallahassee with his wife, Megan, and three sons, Augustine, Sebastian and Maximilian. He is a speech-language pathologist and assistant professor at Florida State University. He works clinically with people who stutter, supervises graduate student clinicians, teaches classes on stuttering and counseling, and researches ways to improve the experience of stuttering. He is the Professional Development Manager for the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association’s Special Interest Group for Counseling (SIG 20). He co-edited the book Stammering Pride & Prejudice with Patrick Campbell and Sam Simpson. Chris enjoys riding his bicycle.
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).