The Stammering Collective grew from a conference at University College Dublin in 2018: Metaphoric Stammers and Embodied Speakers: Exploring Clinical, Cultural and Creative Practice in the area of dysfluent speech. We came from very different fields and perspectives (e.g., artists, musicians using creative practice to express their experience of stammering; those interested in the representation of stammering across different cultural forms – literary, cinematic, political, philosophical; SLTs involved in challenging the medical model of stammering as a ‘disorder’ in search of a ‘cure’, in favour of supporting difference and diversity within our speaking lives). Our underlying aim was to a create a space in which the rich, complex and multifaceted nature of stammering could be acknowledged and explored.
The conference was timely in bringing together those engaged with interdisciplinary approaches to stammering, generating new conversations and collaborations across fields and experiences. In 2019 we received a Wellcome Grant to develop this work, strengthening the exchanges across clinical, cultural and creative practice and, in the process, mapping out the emerging field of Dysfluency Studies. While we acknowledge and nurture the different ways in which stammering can be experienced and expressed, at the core of the project is a shared commitment to challenging concepts of ‘normal’ speech and the pathologisation of vocal difference this engenders, combining our voices (dysfluent, fluent, and all within/between) to ‘sound’ the richness and complexity of vocal difference.
The project was initially structured around our key strands (clinical, cultural and creative), offering space to those in each area to communicate their approach to others in the group; this then formed the basis for feedback and discussion across our varied fields and experiences. As the project has developed, we have increasingly moved away from these original alignments, towards the kind of collaborative concepts and concerns that have emerged from discussion. These are the topics that shape the focus, organisation and design of The Stammering Collective website. In many cases the topics overlap and inform each other and the website works to represent that flow/exchange of ideas in a way that emulates the kinds of generative conversations we continue to have, yet also invites other voices from the broader stammering community to join the discussions – expanding and enriching the present collective.
Underscoring the content of the website is the soundtrack of dysfluency. We see the website as an opportunity to ‘sound’ the stammer, both in terms of the distinctive ways in which many of us stammer (a rich repertoire of repetitions, elongations and blocks) and in relation to those of us who do not stammer – disrupting the artificial barriers between ’normal’ and dysfluent speech through the voices of a varied and vitally interconnected community of speakers.