An a-n professional development bursary opportunity. I hesitate.
The form is easy – no Grantium this! It is beautifully clear and the text boxes open up as you fill them in. So there’s no rigid and obfuscating letter box slit format to squint at (demanding scroll, scroll to see sentences and meaning unfold or in some cases unravel). And we are talking words – not characters. It is short and doable. Amen.
But still – there is something about it I don’t understand. Like looking at a swimming pool with a view to jumping in when you can’t judge the depth and have never swum a stroke in your life.
A familiar sensation for an autistic person I think, and there should be a phrase for this. To draw a blank? Too commonplace. Vertiginous? Accurate but dealing only with effect.
A phrase conjuring the absence of something would be better. Words for when you can’t visualise something. When there is no mental image, no equivalent to draw on, no reference point. It’s a little dreamlike. The sensation that your reality has become subverted, or faintly absurd. Everything indicates that it should be obvious but it just isn’t.
We seem to be in the area of no, mental template available! I imagine this phrase spoken in a robotic voice like the one which blurts, unexpected item in baggage area, at the M&S self service checkout.
Somehow there is no map, no compass, and certainly no GPS. But there never is for the autistic person when dealing with hidden assumptions.
This translates as point of no entry. The door is not so much locked as missing.
All my life I have experienced this without knowing it had a name, or that the name was autism – or rather the effects of neuro-normative cultures on the autistic mind. It is the most usual sensation to find a no entry sign slapped on opportunity, from the most mundane to the highest forms. This is about a wider lack of fit and not a specific criticism of what is an excellent pro-forma in itself.
I’m simply unable to read the hidden social text embedded within most neuro-normative forms. Socially embedded codes are so very pervasive that the predominant neuro-culture is blind to their bias’.
The autistic mind is sometimes described as concrete and literal. I feel this is quite mistaken. It is simply that (in my case at least) I have to see and feel something to understand and gain knowledge, either this or to have had an equivalent experience to draw a parallel. Direct sources of information are best – drawing parallels is what we have to do so often but can be seriously hit and miss. A best guess on imperfect information.
One of the hardest things is knowing what’s expected when it isn’t spelt out. Professional development is assumed as a common term – when the neuro-normative versions of this are socially embedded and likely to be quite alien (to an autistic person).
The assumption is one of shared values and experiences so that it can be taken as read what is meant by professional development. But an autistic person is unlikely to intuit what this feels and looks like from a neuro-normative perspective without prior knowledge.
An autistic person really needs to be informed about what this covers, as they would almost certainly come at this question from an entirely different perspective.
Professional development as a concept in an art context needs to be broken down into its component parts if we’re to level the playing field for autistic artists. For this we need to unpick and then move beyond neuro-normative cultural assumptions and begin a conversation about professional development autism style.
In this instance I think a good place to start would be a far more comprehensive bullet point list of what can and can’t be covered by the a-n bursaries. Such a list would be nothing short of a ramp.
For my part I got lucky and found kindness and a translator. Twitter can be very useful. I still don’t know if I’m filling the form in right, but at least I’m having a go.
In general terms it needs to be acknowledged that access goes beyond the template itself (and this one is so good) to deeper issues of pervasive social bias for which autistic artists need additional support.
