Our Stories: (Re)Imagining Disability Futures Through Autobiographical Performance by Neurodiverse Artists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In response to the lack of neurodivergent (self)representation on Canadian stages, this dissertation explores autobiographical performance as a vehicle for self-advocacy and imagining disability futures differently. Over seven months in 2021, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I brought four neurodivergent artists together on Zoom to co-create a performance piece about their lived experience. What emerged was Our Stories, a presentation of autobiographical storytelling that uses song, dance, poetry, and theatrical monologue to reflect upon and respond to these artists’ past and present experiences, as well as their goals for the future. Shaped methodologically by performance ethnography, this project illustrates the significance of the in-between moments and the learning that can emerge through the process of devising and creating new work with an interabled team. \nEach chapter of this dissertation illuminates the process of co-creating Our Stories while contextualizing the themes and findings that emerged in relation to existing scholarly discourse.\nChapter 1 offers an overview of the interdisciplinary fields of research that informed this project and highlights the most salient scholarship. Chapter 2 explores the process of creating Our Stories and reflects upon accessible co-creation strategies and working within non-normative temporalities and structures. Chapter 3 engages in depth with the completed work and serves as a kind of script analysis, offering further context for the creative decisions made and highlights themes of representation, autonomy, and authorship. Chapter 4 discusses what happened after the presentation of Our Stories, how care and relations were maintained even after the formal research project had concluded and what this means in the context of public allyship and interabled friendship.\nThis dissertation contributes to the currently limited scholarship around neurodivergent self-representation on stage and highlights the value of upholding practices of care and interdependence in interabled artist collaborations and the significance of performing and (re)imagining disability futures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".