​Neurodiversity: Building Community & Rethinking the Built Environment
The book -in progress- is a curated collection of interdiscursive essays that aim to stimulate dialogue amongst designers, medical field experts, and people with neurodiversities, and their caregivers, in regard to issues of inclusion and accessibility of our current environments and with particular focus on designing for neurodiverse individuals and those with ASD.
The book examines neurodiversity as a source of opportunity in space design while advocating for authorship, agency, and participation for all inhabitants of our spaces. The work will include contributions from notable architects, experimental psychologists, occupational and speech therapists, neurophysiologists, neuroaesthetists, autistics, parents, autism advocates, and support groups. The work aims to generate a cross-disciplinary forum and to raise awareness. We see it as a project of interaction; a provocation to explore soft disciplinary borders and wider fields of knowledge and human experience.
The book is an indirect outcome of the Neurodiversity & the Built Environment from Fall2020 until the present, an international symposium, organized by Severino Alfonso and Loukia Tsafoulia in collaboration with Dr. Wendy Ross and the Center for Autism and Neurodiversity at Thomas Jefferson University. The Fall 2020 symposium was the first in a series of symposiums to follow. Please find more information on the event here: Jefferson.edu/NeurodiversitySymposium
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The book is currently in progress. It has been awarded the Seed Grant for the 2021-2022 cycle from the Office of Applied Research at Thomas Jefferson University.