It’s an interesting time for therapists working with stammering. Not always a comfortable seat at the table when we’re considering the social model of disability with questions about what’s useful and what’s unhelpful, even harmful, in our work, and when our laziest thinking and assumptions are challenged. The online discussion group ‘Advanced Conversations in Stammering’ … read more…
Gender expression and fluency aren’t usually two things people pair together, however stammering is forced to exist on a binary in a similar way to gender. Children are always taught fluency is the inherent good while stammering is the undesirable bad, that it’s supposedly impossible to feel any other way about it. As any person … 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…
Learnings from the 2019 Annual Conference of the National Stuttering Association of the USA In 2019 I was surprised to receive an invitation to address the annual pre-conference of the National Stuttering Association of America (NSA). To this day, when it comes to neurodivergent conditions, people tend to think of Autism, ADHD, the Dys “sisters”, Lexia, … read more…
What happens when we view speech and language therapy for children who stutter as a celebration of difference rather than a process of chasing fluency? Is it possible to throw a party announcing we stutter, loud and proud? About three years ago I sat in a room with six 10 and 11 year old boys … read more…
I was invited to join my first monthly stammering support group about a year ago. I remember the feeling of excitement at being in a room full of people who sounded like me and who had some understanding of what the daily experience of stammering is like. A couple of months back Patrick Campbell, co-author … read more…
It’s October 1986. I’m a timid, stammering sixth form student on a school trip to London from rural East Yorkshire to see two of the outstanding actresses of their generation perform in Nuria Espert’s acclaimed adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s last and arguably greatest play, The House of Bernarda Alba. Set in southern Spain in … read more…
It is incredible to think that ‘Stammering Pride and Prejudice: Difference not Defect‘ has been published for a full year now. To celebrate the book’s first anniversary, we have released the Introduction to read for free on the J&R Press webpage here. You can also listen to Patrick Campbell reading the Introduction aloud as … read more…
When one of the directors of the school district I work for asked me to “speak up more” during meetings, I got defensive. At one meeting, he even forgot I was there and skipped over me when it was my turn to present. I’m a quiet person, but I speak with intention. As a school-based … read more…
‘Stammering does not exist in a vacuum’ I remember being drawn to this line when editing Christopher Constantino’s chapter of Stammering Pride and Prejudice. It’s the type of sentence I tend to like: it’s short, simple but it also makes you think. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently. I’m not sure about you, … read more…