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- Convenors:
-
Antti Lindfors
(University of Helsinki)
Toni Nieminen (University of Helsinki)
Daiva Bartušienė (Vytautas Magnus University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel examines how disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence reshape language, communication, and interaction. We explore how embodied difference - pain, fatigue, sensory variation - mediates social and moral polarization around credibility, intelligibility, and wellbeing.
Long Abstract
This panel explores how disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence challenge conventional understandings of language, communication, and interaction. Drawing on linguistic and medical anthropology, as well as adjacent fields concerned with the semiotic mediation of embodied experience and difference, we ask how bodily and affective variation - whether marked by pain, fatigue, sensory sensitivity or limitation, or atypical sociality - shapes and is shaped by diverse ecologies of interaction and expression. These dynamics, in turn, produce frameworks for what is seen as credible, legible, and real for disabled individuals and groups across social, political, and material contexts.
In societies increasingly organised around normative ideals of capability, productivity, and self-management, communicative and embodied frictions often become sites of moral and epistemic polarization - between medical and experiential knowledge, autonomy and co-dependence, or credibility and disbelief. These dialectical relations shape the contours of social coherence and give rise to distinct forms of sociality, each producing its own genres of wellbeing and intelligibility. Yet within the prevailing social climate, only some of these forms are recognized as legible and credible, while others are relegated to the margins, rendered obscure and unintelligible.
We invite contributions that examine how language and communicative practice mediate bodily difference across social, clinical, and digital settings. Possible topics include the pragmatics of institutional and diagnostic encounters, neurodiverse or alternative communicative repertoires, the moral and political framing of embodied variation in public discourse, and the interactional schemata through which disabled communicative experience becomes polarized across diverse contexts.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Following autistic artist Jin Li’s humming and praise songs through Korean churches and disability arts spaces, this paper shows how sensory vocal practices unsettle norms of cleanliness, cure, and intelligibility, revealing disability as a world-making mode of communication.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how autistic artist Jin Li’s humming, singing, and tactile practices reconfigure communicative norms within contemporary Korean Christian and disability institutions. Drawing on an ethnographic documentary project, The Cat that Lives in Your Dreams, and writing on modernization, cleanliness, and Christianity in Korea, the paper traces how Jin Li’s favorite praise songs, repetitive humming, and onomatopoeic phrases operate as a communicative repertoire that exceeds both clinical descriptions of “atypical” language and church idioms of cure, purity, and moral uplift.
Fieldwork at a Seoul rehabilitation center and a megachurch disability ministry shows how her vocalizations are alternately celebrated as evidence of spiritual joy, treated as “noise” to be managed, or ignored in favor of more legible linguistic forms. In contrast, in New York spaces such as YAI Arts and Positive Exposure, the same humming and singing become recognized as part of Jin Li’s artistic process, shaping how she paints, encounters others, and moves through urban environments. These shifting framings reveal how sensory difference is calibrated against competing regimes of cleanliness, productivity, and religiosity tied to Korean modernization.
By following a single autistic artist’s sounds across prayer rooms, studios, and streets, the paper argues that vocalization, gesture, and repetition are not merely symptomatic but world-making practices that generate distinct genres of wellbeing and relation. It shows how communicative “frictions” around humming and song become sites where autonomy, dependence, and spiritual worth are negotiated, illuminating how disability reshapes what counts as credible, intelligible communication in polarized medical, religious, and artistic ecologies.
Paper short abstract
This presentation examines how literal mind shapes autistic women’s communication during perinatal care in Lithuanian clinical contexts. Qualitative data shows that metaphorical language, implicit social norms, and instructions can increase anxiety, misinterpretation, and obstetric complications.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how literal thinking shapes autistic women’s communicative experiences during pregnancy and childbirth in Lithuanian clinical settings. Drawing on qualitative data, it demonstrates that linguistic metaphors, implicit social rules, and ambiguously articulated medical instructions generate significant anxiety, insecurity, and miscommunication in perinatal care.
Analysis of participants’ narratives shows how embodied neurodivergence intersects with power, credibility, and responsibility in perinatal care. Autistic women experience ongoing pressure to appear “understanding,” “compliant,” and capable of “correctly” interpreting medical discourse, while deviations are often moralized and individualized. Metaphorical language and unarticulated social norms not only hinder communication but also directly contribute to obstetric complications.
The research contributes to interdisciplinary debates in medical anthropology, disability studies, and the sociology of health by positioning communication as a critical site of vulnerability in perinatal medicine. It highlights the importance of neuroaffirmative obstetric care that acknowledges neurodivergent ways of understanding, prioritizes explicit and concrete communication, and shifts the responsibility for clarity from patients to healthcare institutions. By centering autistic women’s experiences, the research underscores the ethical and practical necessity of adapting clinical practices to support diverse communicative and cognitive styles in maternity care.
Paper short abstract
This is a study of how young Chinese women engaging with ADHD as an interpretive framework develop new languages and emergent care-based narratives through digital feminist storytelling, reshaping the ecologies of interpretation surrounding embodied difference.
Paper long abstract
ADHD is now one of the most contested medical and bodily category whose heterogeneity renders its meanings unstable across cultural and clinical contexts. In contemporary China, growing attention to adult ADHD has intensified public debates about the legitimacy, intelligibility, and social implications of the diagnosis. Young women have become central to this emerging field of concern, even as gendered and age-based assumptions continue to obscure their experiences and constrain the interpretive frames available to them. This research examines how young women navigate and rework ADHD as both an embodied difference and a communicative problem: a struggle to be understood, believed, and recognized within everyday interactions. In digital feminist worlds, women experiment with new forms of storytelling, affective expression, and peer-to-peer interpretation, creating loosely organized ecologies of support in which biomedical knowledge, lived experience, and political critique circulate together. These narrative practices offer alternative temporalities—nonlinear, uncertain, and emotionally saturated—through which participants articulate their distress, recalibrate self-understanding, and contest prevailing norms about personality, productivity, intimacy, and gender. Drawing on neurodiversity theory and collective narrative approaches in critical ADHD studies, this project explores how digital storytelling becomes a site for negotiating legibility and cultivating partial forms of biocitizenship. Rather than treating ADHD as a fixed diagnostic object, young women mobilize its interpretive flexibility to claim epistemic authority, reorganize relational expectations, and imagine more livable ways of being within a polarized social landscape.
Paper short abstract
Functional disorders produce disabling, fluctuating symptoms without clear pathology, challenging biomedical and semiotic models of causality. Drawing on linguistic anthropology, affect theory, and disability studies, this paper shows how symptoms reconfigure agency, temporality, and credibility.
Paper long abstract
Functional disorders (f.ex., fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, environmental sensitivities) challenge biomedical and anthropological analysis in producing debilitating, fluctuating symptoms without identifiable pathology but also in defying the semiotic conventions through which medicine links symptoms to causes. Drawing on linguistic anthropology, affect theory, and disability studies, this paper develops animated illness as a framework for understanding how these conditions reconfigure bodily agency and vitality. I argue that functional symptoms enact a form of animacy in which the body becomes a volatile co-agent – reactive, anticipatory, and affectively porous – that destabilizes cultural hierarchies of legibility and agency. This instability is temporal as well as phenomenological, as symptoms shift across hours or days, prompting sufferers to map fluctuations against stress, relational tensions, and everyday sensory exposures. Such temporal attunement informs practices of interpretation and recovery, complicating linear models of illness progression. By approaching symptoms as figurations that emerge from dynamic entanglements of physiology, environment, and semiotic ideology, the paper shows how functional disorders unsettle the boundary between somatic and psychological, reconfigure biomedical semiotics, and expose the political stakes of who is recognized as agentive, credible, and ill.
Paper short abstract
The article analyzes how translating petitions into Polish Sign Language (PJM) reconfigures communicative relations, reshaping the attribution of agency and illocutionary force. It highlights tensions between the embodied modality of PJM and bureaucratic, procedural communication.
Paper long abstract
This article examines how embodied sensory difference mediates communicative practices and assumptions about intelligibility and credibility in the translation of written civic petitions into Polish Sign Language (PJM). Drawing on Bauman and Briggs (1991), Goffman (1981), and the sign language linguistics notion of depiction (Dudis 2007, 2011), I argue that translating petitions into Polish Sign Language (PJM) entails a reconfiguration of communicative relations, altering the attribution of agency, interpretation, and illocutionary force.
The empirical material consists of two petitions submitted by the Polish Association of the Deaf (PZG) to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Health during the first week of the COVID-19 pandemic. The petition texts were published simultaneously in written Polish and in PJM on the PZG website. I begin from the premise that PJM lacks an established legal register or a genre corresponding to the official written petition. As a result, the PJM version transforms the original text into a hybrid form that draws on the affordances of the visual modality.
The analysis points to potential communicative tensions that arise from the embodied modality. Signers establish legitimacy through the semiotic affordances of PJM. However, these very resources may be reinterpreted within the institutional frame of “communication with public administration” as excessive or overly “demanding.” What emerges is a structural misalignment between a modality that encodes claims interpersonally and a bureaucratic regime that expects those claims to be formulated in a detached, procedural manner.
Paper short abstract
In de-escalation expertise, the body figures as an important site of expressiveness. Through ethnographic engagement with de-escalation in German health and welfare services, I discuss how notions of disability, debility, and incapacity inform uses of non-verbal communication in this field.
Paper long abstract
In many facilities providing health and social welfare services in Germany, de-escalation is trained, mandated and practiced as a professional approach towards aggressive and potentially violent behavior. Through de-escalation trainings, staff learns how to interact with patients and clients in tense and potentially dangerous situations. The body figures in these encounters as an important and at times privileged site of expressiveness, which can be read through registers of universality as well as registers of difference. In this contribution, I ask how notions of disability, debility and exceptional states are interwoven with verbal and nonverbal communication in de-escalation expertise. My ethnographic data centers on de-escalation trainings for staff in health and welfare settings and on de-escalation practices in Berlin emergency accommodations for unhoused people. (De-)escalating bodies in this field are understood as bodies under stress, with (temporarily) altered cognitive and sensorial capacities. Categories of physical, mental or cognitive difference underpin these understandings in several ways, linking to permanent or temporary differences in perception, behavior and capacity. Stress in de-escalation expertise connotes danger, as it is understood to compromise the capacity for self control and rational thought, but also a condition to be cared for in order to mitigate risk. These registers of care and security, I show, also come with different knower-positionalities, ranging from detached and universalizing readings of what is often called body language, to the body as a device for making contact alongside, or in lieu of, verbal language.
Paper short abstract
This paper focuses on how anthropological and psychiatric modes of knowing attend to people who do not ordinarily express themselves through intentional speech-acts that exteriorize an internal core or inner self, in terms of temporally coherent narrativization.
Paper long abstract
This paper asks: how might anthropological and psychiatric modes of knowing attend to people who do not ordinarily express themselves through intentional speech-acts that exteriorize an internal core or inner self, in terms of temporally coherent narrativization? In psychiatric terms, these are people whose ‘baseline’ communicative styles themselves have been assessed and classified as ‘poverty of speech’, ‘alogia’, ‘mutism’ and so on. These may alternatively be described as non-standardised, atypical or unconventional modes of expression and communication (Marlovitz and Wolf-Meyer 2021; McKearney 2021). Here, the objective for therapy cannot be an ahistorical, noncontextually defined ‘restoration’ of abilities and capacities to communicate in standardised, conventional and typical ways. At the same time, accessing and assessing the person’s mental state through the form and content of their speech – considered by psychiatrists to be the carrier of the form and content of people’s thoughts – itself becomes difficult or even impossible. Through an ethnography of medical student classrooms, an inpatient mental health ward, a community mental health clinic for people with intellectual disabilities in Central London, I focus on psychiatric diagnosis and treatment at the limit of words. The paper thus foregrounds the challenges, frustrations and discomforts amongst psychiatrists when they contend with the opacity or absence of speech that is considered to be the exteriorised carrier of people’s inner life. Patients’ and caregivers' voices are embedded in other forms of embodiment, which psychiatrists must discern through relying less on material markers of 'disordered' speech and thought.