I had been meaning to contribute to Redefining Stammering for some time now. Sam reached out after reading a paper I had published, with co-authors Ellen Rombouts and Pascal Borry, in the Journal of Fluency Disorders.
The paper, a carved-up version of my master’s thesis, presented the following argument: the scientific hope of discovering developmental stuttering’s biological explanation is seen as a reasonable hope because, among other things, it frames stuttering as a ‘lack’ and a ‘deficit’ to be rehabilitated. The paper argued that this hope, driven by its ableist language, is fundamentally disabling in nature: it disables, or forecloses, the possibility for alternate hopes to stabilise, i.e., a hope in a future where stuttering is not something to be managed and corrected – a ‘lack’ not to be coped with and a ‘deficiency’ not to be remedied. To manage this disablement, the paper suggested, the scientific community should incorporate participatory research methods into their practice.