Creating worlds and discussing emotions: Dr Fiona Mitchell's workshop for Specialist Autism Services

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Creation of the Universe,
National Gallery of Art 10606. Details here

This posting concerns something I've been meaning to write about since earlier in the summer: when Dr Emma Bridges sent me a link to a report on a recent workshop that I might be interested in. This was because it concerns an initiative that relates to my interests in classical myth and its appeal for autistic people.

The workshop was led by Dr Fiona Mitchell, now at the University of Birmingham, whom I remember well from visiting her previous place of work. Here she had developed a range of teaching activities which came at classics from innovative angles, such as via a study of monsters.

The workshop was on creation stories and it was run for Specialist Autism Services in Leeds. The report mentions one area that has got me especially intrigued, namely a discussion of emotions in creation stories and how they might relate to those experienced by modern people:

"Some gods get angry when they don’t get enough sleep; the extent to which the gods of some traditions embody and represent things like anger and lust; the consequences of the emotions of the gods (e.g. Demeter’s sadness is the cause of winter; angry gods sometimes cause devastation)."

There could be much potential here - including for thinking about the potential for ancient myth to engage autistic people thinking about emotions. There is a fit, for instance with the discussion of creation myth I reported on at the recent Show and Tell at Cardiff. Plus, as I've mentioned in several blog postings, such as this one, one of the goals of the activities I am developing concerns the emotions that might be stimulated by Hercules as he experiences a strange place where he needs to make a difficult choice.

Also, in a tweet from soon after the event, Fiona mentioned how the creation narratives might lead to reflections on 'how we might create our own worlds.' On the webpage created specially for the workshop, Fiona says, further to this:

"If you were going to make a world from scratch, how would you do it? What would your ideal world look like? What would you make people out of? How would you make people differently? If you created the world, would you rule it too? Or just let it run itself?"

There might well be a fit here with another aspect of the activities, discussed here for example (scroll around two-third down) namely to draw on the love of fantasy common among autistic people.

In short, Fiona's work looks wonderful - and I'm going to write to her about it right now.