Episode 430: Autistic Storytelling—Bodies, Objects, and Distributed Narrative

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Recorded28 Nov 2025

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Today’s episode provides an overview and meditation on Sarinah O’Donoghue’s 2023 essay, “Thinking with Sticks.” The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, emphasises a posthumanist perspective on autistic narrative, arguing that communication and meaning extend beyond verbal language and are co-authored by bodies, objects, movement, and sensory life. Dr. Hoerricks examines two foundational works in autistic self-advocacy, Mel Baggs’ In My Language and Adam Wolfond & Estée Klar’s S/Pace, to illustrate how material components, such as sticks or stones, function as thinking partners and communicative elements. This framework challenges the notion that intelligence is housed solely in the brain, instead proposing that cognition is distributed and relational, which validates non-traditional forms of expression like stimming and facilitated communication (FC). Ultimately, she advocates for recognising autistic experience as a valid and complex form of human patterning where the world actively participates in storytelling.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/in-my-language-in-my-space-autisticLet me know what you think.The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.