Glossary

Ableism is a form of discrimination that favours able-bodied people and treats being able-bodied as the ideal. It is based on the idea that any difference from this ideal is negative or a loss. As a result, ableism is harmful. Ableism can take many forms. It can include stigmatising beliefs, attitudes and behaviours towards disabled people, as well as policies, practices and social values that disadvantage disabled people. Ableism can also become internalised, meaning that disabled people can absorb negative beliefs about disability and apply these beliefs to themselves or other disabled people.

Habits of listening that expect voices to be fluent and exclude voices that are not; the tendency to take dysfluent speech as suspicious or less serious.

A fundamental human need to be welcomed into community and have a meaningful place in the world; both physical and psychological.

A framework of health that attempts to identify, minimize, and eliminate non-normative bodily functioning; often downplays personal experience in favour of proposed universal truths about human biology.

A metaphorical space of dysfluency where new possibilities for gathering and communicating emerge.

A shared process of making meaning between two or more people.

The social expectation that everyone will only speak fluently.

A theoretical framework that views disability as a valuable human variation, whose meaning is shaped by cultural values and practices.

The belief that dysfluent folk must become normal in order to belong.

Marginalized forms of biological diversity that offer valuable forms of sensing, moving, thinking, communicating, relating, and being in the world; biomedically, defined as an abnormality that obstructs the expected functioning of a body or mind.

Movements led by disabled people that fight for rights, recognition, inclusion, and social transformation for their communities.

An intersectional movement that addresses the root systems of oppression that combine together to impact disability communities.

Speech that disrupts social expectations: filled with uncontrolled pauses, repetitions, prolongations, and other surprises; while “disfluency” is the common biomedical term that implies a simple lack of fluency, the term “dysfluency” emphasizes its unruly and transformative force.

An emerging field of study that embraces dysfluency as culturally and politically valuable, and explores the ways in which we are socialized to privilege fluent speech

An artistic style that invites rupture and interruption; it does not consider the sound and sight of dysfluencies to be mistakes, but rather textures within artistic and communicative expression.

Unlike clock time—a recent and machinic way of understanding time—dysfluent time follows the rhythms of the body, open to pauses, repetition, and multidirectional flows.

Speech that flows off the tongue smoothly, predictably, and without the effort.

The unconscious bias towards uninterrupted speech that allows fluent speakers opportunities not afforded to dysfluent speakers.

The halfway approach where society tolerates dysfluent people as long as their disability is not disruptive.

The personal experience of time; the way a moment can stretch or bend based on what is happening and how one feels.

Intersectionality is a concept developed by Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. It describes how different parts of a person’s identity, such as disability, race, gender, class, sexuality or age, can overlap and shape their experiences of discrimination and inequality. For example, a person who stutters may experience ableism alongside racism, sexism or other forms of discrimination. These different forms of discrimination can interact, creating experiences that may be different from experiencing each form of discrimination separately. Intersectionality helps us understand how different forms of inequality can overlap and affect people at the same time.

A theoretical framework that views disability as a biological defect always in need of medical intervention.

An umbrella term that encapsulates a range of non-normative brain function; emerging from autistic communities, the term suggests that non-normative brain function is not inherently bad, but instead is a meaningful site of human diversity.

A social standard, typically based on statistical averages, that both privileges particular forms of human existence and categorizes others as deficient and in need of correction.

Objective and measurable time; clock-driven time that organizes the human world in predictable ways.