Autism and Classical Myth: Updates: book chapter, Bright-Eyed study, paper on myth as bearer of autistic hope for diversity event

Why classical myth and autism?

Why classical myth and autism?

The idea for this project started to take shape at a meeting in 2008 with a special needs teacher, who mentioned that, in her experience and those of her colleagues, autistic children often enjoy classical myth. I began to wonder why this might be the case, and whether – as a classicist who researches, and loves, classical myth – there was anything I could contribute. I started this blog to report on my progress which was often sporadic until the launch of the Warsaw-based European Research Council-funded project Our Mythical Childhood (2016-22) to trace the role of classics in children’s culture.

My key contribution to the project is an exploration of classics in autistic children’s culture, above all by producing myth-themed activities for autistic children. This blog shares my progress, often along Herculean paths, including to a book of lessons for autistic children focusing on the Choice of Hercules between two very different paths in life. The image above, illustrating the homepage of this blog, is one of the drawings by Steve K. Simons, the book's illustrator, of a chimneypiece panel in a neoclassical villa at Roehampton in South West London. The lessons centre on this panel.

Monday, 9 October 2017

Updates: book chapter, Bright-Eyed study, paper on myth as bearer of autistic hope for diversity event

Here is a quick update on some of my activities to date since my previous posting. The month or so after that posting was spent writing a paper of c. 9000 words for the book growing out of the conference on Mythical Hope on which I blogged in that posting. Since then, I've begun work on another paper linked with the Our Mythical Childhood project - on a topic that might well end up resonating with my autism work, through I'm too early on in the project to make any confident assertions yet. I have written a couple of postings to date on this paper - which concerns a work of children's literature, Richard Woff's Bright-Eyed Athena - for another blog I keep. This is a blog on misc. aspects of the deity Athena. Thirdly, I am, right now, preparing a paper on my autism and classical myth work for a conference later this week at Roehampton on diversity and Classics. This event takes place under the aegis of Classics and Social Justice, from whose social media presence comes the image at the head of this posting. I plan to blog about this paper soon.