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I am Autistic
My name is Jenn and I am autistic. It could however just be that my name is autistic and I am Jenn. You see both these concepts are interchangeable in my head; existing the same space. They join my other identities as a mum, a fashion designer, a digital marketing professional, a business owner and…
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Air and light and time and space: how successful academics write (a book review)
Given I am about to begin writing my dissertation the process of ‘how’ to write, as in, finding the time, space, company, motivation and craft to write are of interest to me. Writing has always been an agonising, if increasingly more rewarding process, as I find my own style and confidence in the feedback that…
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The beginning…
This… Researchers cannot assign value to one meaning without acknowledging the role that they personally play within this construction (Guba & Lincoln, 1989). Qualitative research has usefully attempted to acknowledge this limitation through reflexivity (MacBeth, 2001; Willig, 2001). Reflexive research requires an awareness of the researcher’s contribution to the construction of meaning and the improbability of remaining neutral,…
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Autism Dialogue Conference 2018
This year I have participated in the Autism Dialogue programme developed by Jonny Drury, in Sheffield, based upon Bohm Dialogue principles that are widely used in business and academia. The inaugural conference took place on the 14th December 2018 and I was invited to speak about the impression that AD had on me. The process…
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People are more than their diagnoses.
“It was this prognosis of doom, this life sentence, this death before death that I instinctively rejected when the words “You are wrong” formed silently within me. With the wisdom of hindsight I understand why this moment in the psychiatrist’s office was a major turning point in my recovery process. When I rejected the prognosis of doom…
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Dialogical practice
The idea of dialogue, in relation to my developing professional practice, and also within my research work, seems to be occurring more and more frequently. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a dialogue as either: A conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or film. ‘the book consisted of a series…
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I hear voices, I just didn’t ever realise the significance of it.
Today was the section of my research module that detailed the experiences of voice hearers, via a person-centred construct that applied meaning to their experiences, moving it away from a pathologised symptom of illness. Instead, voices are expressed as a natural response to traumatic events, often appearing at times of high stress and when reframed…