What is the impact of childhood intervention on those who continue to stutter into adulthood? Many adults have shared their experiences in memoirs, on podcasts, in blogs, etc. and most of those experiences are stories of recovery – not from stuttering, but from the impact of earlier therapy. Parents can benefit from reading these accounts, … read more…
Something serendipitous has welled up in my PhD research. An unexpected connection has sparked and fused. This connection is all about time, or rather its disruption, through usurping societal expectations of chronological time. It spans between my research area and the creative approach. This connection is opening up possibilities for thinking creatively around disfluency. The … read more…
‘Holding space’ means being fully present and curious with someone as they express their experiences, without judging or attempting to change them. In this blog post, I will explore why ‘holding space’ is so crucial in stammering therapy. How many times have you been speaking with someone about an experience or how you feel about … read more…
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 … read more…
The origins of the ‘normal range’ and the Medical Model In the latter 1800s, Sir Francis Galton, statistician and proponent of eugenics, Darwin’s survival of the fittest and scientific racism, was the first person to apply statistical methods to study human difference, describing the ‘normal distribution’ in human characteristics, determining everything from the average attractiveness … read more…
Models and Metaphors Bit by bit, humans make models of the world to try and make sense of it. This is as true for disability as it is for astrophysics or evolutionary biology. In my contribution to Stammering Pride and Prejudice, I outlined just four ways that disability has been modeled: “a cosmic sign … read more…