Hosts Patrick Campbell and Maria Stewart are joined by Conor Foran and Sam Simpson to discuss Sam’s article Looking Back, Looking Forward from the book Stammering Pride and Prejudice: Difference not Defect.
Sam’s article speaks to the frustration but also the hope of change in how stuttering is considered within the speech therapy profession. Together, they discuss topics like the power of the social model of disability, how people who stammer can make choices when it comes to different therapies, and how narratives around advancements in neuroscience may be damaging to stuttering and other disability movements.
Speakers
Sam Simpson is a speech and language therapist, person-centred counsellor, supervisor and trainer living outside London, England. Sam has a particular interest in critical disability studies, stammering activism and what stammering can teach us about ourselves and the world. Sam actively promotes stammering-affirming therapy practices and culture. Together with Patrick Campbell and Chris Constantino, Sam co-edited Stammering Pride and Prejudice: Difference not Defect in 2019.
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.
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).