My contribution to The Stammering Collective was a talk reflecting on my work carried out over the last 10 years in relation to public understanding and awareness of stammering.  I questioned how stammering is perceived and defined by the public, spoke about how we might change wider understanding of stammering, and how we might be able to move beyond popular narratives of “overcoming” stammering.

Media engagement has been part of my professional roles with the Irish Stammering Association, the Irish Association of Speech and Language Therapists and the International Communication Project. A consistent theme I have promoted in print media, online publications, and in radio and television interviews is that, essentially, it is ok to stammer. Furthermore, it need not be seen as a negative quality needing to be fixed and it should certainly not limit the possibilities for an individual. These messages need to be repeated.

As the talk was intended as a conversation starter, it did not have a neat conclusion. Public engagement will continue over the coming years. I look forward to seeing where the conversation leads to in 2032 and again in 2042. I would hope that the “overcoming” narrative has changed and that I am able to listen to many more stammering voices on my hologram device. I also hope that these stammering voices are talking about lots of interesting things beyond the topic of stammering.  

You have to see yourself in society to be a part of that society

Visual activism to confront and challenge societal preconceptions:

Look → Think → Act

Simi Linton (1998) in Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity quoted by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson:
 "We wield that white cane, or ride that wheelchair or limp that limp” … luxuriate in that stammer?

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The portrait invites us to stare, engrossed perhaps less with the “strangeness” of this woman’s disability and more with the strangeness of witnessing such dignity in a face that marks a life we have learned to imagine as unliveable and unworthy, as the kind of person we routinely detect in advance through medical technology and eliminate from our human community.

— Garland-Thomson (2009)

Flaunt the visible marks of disability. The relish with which disabled people can live their identity and present themselves to the starees.

6A01.1 Developmental speech fluency disorder.

International Classification of Diseases for Mortality and Morbidity Statistics.

Developmental speech fluency disorder is characterised by frequent or pervasive disruption of the normal rhythmic flow and rate of speech characterised by repetitions and prolongations in sounds, syllables, words, and phrases, as well as blocking and word avoidance or substitutions. The speech dysfluency is persistent over time. The onset of speech dysfluency occurs during the developmental period and speech fluency is markedly below what would be expected for age. Speech dysfluency results in significant impairment in social communication, personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning. The speech dysfluency is not better accounted for by a Disorder of Intellectual Development, a Disease of the Nervous System, a sensory impairment, or a structural abnormality, or other speech or voice disorder.

• Disability viewed as a human rights issue.
• Direct challenge to the medical model & institutions within which most SLTs have been trained and work.

Calls into question:

• Principles upon which therapy is based.
• Roles of therapist/client.
• Language.
• Range of therapies offered.
• Types, forms and aims of research into stammering.

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If speech language pathology is the intervention that stuttering activists seek from the government, medicine and private sphere, there is at least a conversation to be had about its medical necessity […] The stutter itself is only a negative bodily development if making people occasionally wait an extra two to ten minutes is a pathological emergency. This is all just to say, the burden should be on speech pathologists to prove their legitimacy on something more than merely auditory aesthetics.

— Richter (2019, p.73-74)

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Call for action

• Ethical responsibility.
• Locating therapy discourse within wider disability/neurodiversity discourse.
• Call for broader focus of therapy to address roles that self-identity, society and social stigma play.
• Drive to enrich and enhance professional accounts.
• Co-authoring therapy knowledge.

I would say in a few words that if either of these methods is able to be adopted with success on occasions in an easy and agreeable manner, a real step has been gained towards overcoming the affection; but if the sufferer is told to persist in uttering er, or to sing or roar out his words on all occasions, and trust to these as his infallible remedies, he will probably fail, for the remedies are so much worse than the disease that all sensitive minds would instinctively shun them with horror, and despond the more in consequence.

— Monro (1850)

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Other Examples of Stuttering Humour in Victorian Culture

• Humorous songs such as “The Stuttering Lass”.
• Minor characters in Victorian popular fiction.
• The celebrated theatrical character of Lord Dundreary performed by Edward Sothern. First appearance in the play Our American Cousin (1858). “Dundrearyism” in the periodical press.

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• Anthologized throughout the nineteenth century in numerous anthologies of wit and humor, as well as  recitation manuals.
• In many of its incarnations, the “two stammerers” joke concludes with two people who stammer coming to blows because they each misperceive the other’s stammer as mockery.  

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To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck.
To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment.
To invent the family automobile is to produce the pile-up on the highway.

— Virilio (2007)

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Transmission and Social Acceleration

The most obvious, and most measurable form of acceleration is the speeding up of intentional, goal-directed processes of transport, communication, and production (2003, 6).

— Rosa (2003, p. 6)

The center of this idea of communication is the transmission of signals or messages for the purpose of control. It is a view of communication from one of the most ancient of human dreams: the desire to increase the speed and effect of messages as they travel in space.

— Carey (2009, p. 12)

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Functional Accidents and Distributed Agency

[an accident is] a failure in a subsystem, or the system as a whole, that damages more than one unit and in doing so disrupts the ongoing or future output of the system.

— Perrow (1999, p. 66)

[O]n June 16, 1887, a Philadelphia wool dealer named Frank Primrose telegraphed his agent in Kansas to say that he had bought—abbreviated in their agreed code as BAY—500,000 pounds of wool. When the message arrived, the key word had become BUY. The agent began buying wool, and before long the error cost Primrose $20,000, according to the lawsuit he filed against the Western Union Telegraph Company.

— Gleik (2012, p. 166)

Who or what is responsible?

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Untidy Systems

Philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world apparently is filled.

— James, (1996, p. 45)

[James takes seriously] a place for something like an element of chanciness or volatility within [the world’s] loose regularities and historical flows.

— Connolly (2005, p. 73)

In an untidy world, the actant is “a being or entity that makes a difference in the world without quite knowing what it is doing [emphasis added]” (Connolly, 2005, p. 72).

The speech-language pathologist is the professional who engages in clinical services, prevention, advocacy, education, administration, and research in the areas of communication and swallowing across the life span from infancy through geriatrics.

— The American Speech And Hearing Association (ASHA) (2007:1)

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Identity


• Etymological root refers to sameness but often seen as what makes me unique – who I am.
• Medical model/social model.
• Narrative Practice – viewed as “public and social achievement”.
• Co-constructed in “the trafficking of stories about our own and each other’s lives” White (2007, 182).

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The process of professional identity

• Individual process but co-constructed.
• Multiple identities.
• Fluid, dynamic.
• Therapeutic exchanges.
• Stories told and interpreted.
• Cultural Influences.

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How are identities constructed?

O’Dwyer and Leahy (2015)

• Postmodernist thinking – multiple identities are available to an individual at any given time.
• Narratives play a large role in how we construct and re-construct these identities for ourselves and for others.
• Narratives are how we make sense of our experiences and this meaning-making in turn leads to a sense of identity. Bruner (1986: 143) explained that ‘narrative structures organise and give meaning to experience’.  Riessman(2008: 8) states that ‘individuals and groups construct identities through storytelling’ and that these identities are fluid.

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SLTs – multiple identities*

• An individual speech and language therapist has multiple identities available to them at any time.
• More aware of some than others and how conscious/aware they are of any identity at a given time varies.
• Intrapersonal and interpersonal factors influence how these identities are negotiated and renegotiated.
• These identities are negotiated in their interaction with the people they see for therapy and their families/carers.
• “Through clinical interaction clients and clinicians negotiate who they are and the roles they play in the therapy story.” Simmons-Mackie and Damico (2011:44)
• If a particular identity gets validated through these interactions, it takes hold and is performed regularly, If not validated, gets renegotiated.

*O’Dwyer, M.  and Leahy, M.M. (2016). There is no cure for this:  An exploration of the professional identities of speech and language therapists’, Journal of Interactional Research in Communication Disorders, 2, 149-167.

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Who are speech and language therapists working with children and adults who stutter and their families?
 Possible identities:

Communication as Ritual

• Communication, commonness, communion.
• James Carey: the model directs our attention “not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs".
• Akin to religious mass.
• Akin to reading a paper “[n]ews reading, and writing, is a ritual act and moreover a dramatic one. What is arrayed before the reader is not pure information but a portrayal of the contending forces in the world [emphasis added]” (p. 16).

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Dysfluent Accidents as Ritual

• Carol Padden: Ritual emphasizes “performance, activity, and the materiality of communication itself. In this framework, meaning is not so much the definition of a word or sentence but instead is constructed in situ, in social and cultural activity” (p. 44).
• Unlike sending a message, meaning gets enacted in the very midst of unruly bodies that excrete “all levels of expression, from the minute details of discourse—from pitch, emphasis, gesture, head tilts, and eye gaze” (p. 44).
• Moreover, since communication happens “on site,” time cannot be transcended or otherwise avoided with speed but must be lived through.

• Crossed Wires: perhaps it's not that my grumpy co-worker “misheard” my stuttered speech, but that he didn’t want to listen and did not want to belong in time to a common world with this disabled person.
• The Stall: “Part of it feels like my body goes into a kind of supplication or prayer almost. I have a friend who once referred to it as ‘watching me ask for the word’” (Ellis, 2020, n.p.).
• The misfire: “The unexpectedness of stuttering forces both listener and speaker into a space of trust and vulnerability. They must both give up control of the situation. The person speaking does not know when and for how long they will stutter. Likewise, the person listening does not know when to expect a stutter. In order for both people to communicate, they must trust one another. (Constantino 2016, para. 5)
• Ritual? Anti-ritual?

Male gaze (Laura Mulvey)

Dr. Carol Marcus a Leading scientist, has doctorate in applied physics, specializing in advanced weaponry, who happens to take her clothes off halfway through a movie made in 2013 (Star Trek: Into Darkness).

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Medical/clinical gaze (Michel Foucault)

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White gaze (Toni Morrison)

The white gaze is the assumption that the default reader or observer is coming from a perspective of someone who identifies as white, or that people of color sometimes feel need to take into account the white reader or observer's reaction. Various authors of color describe it as a voice in their heads that reminds them that their writing, characters, and plot choices are going to be judged by white readers, and that the reader or viewer, by default, is white.

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Ideas of oppositional gazes have developed: the female gaze

Female gaze has been used to refer to the perspective a female filmmaker (screenwriter/director/producer) brings to a film that would be different from a male view of the subject. Having a female cinematographer allows women to be viewed as they really are and not the voyeuristic spectacle that the male gaze makes them out to be.