Autism and Classical Myth: On cripantiquity and becoming an ancientist :)

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.

Wednesday 30 October 2019

On cripantiquity and becoming an ancientist :)

Hope-themed postings will resume soon - though in a sense everything I write on this blog is hope-fuelled?

I'm sharing something that happened recently - late last week. This was gaining a profile on cripantiquity which, in the words of @cripantiquity, is:

"Amplifying crip voices & building ancientist community among artists, students, activists & academics."

I picked the photo - also included here to the left - because it's of me talking about things linked with the topic of my autism work. This was at a roundtable session for Our Mythical Childhood Survey authors at a conference in Cambridge a couple of years ago. If you're able to read what's on the whiteboard behind me, you'll see both that event's hashtag and the twitter address @OMChildhood.

The cripantiquity profile is here: Scroll up - and in the future down as well... - to see the others!

One final thought: 'ancientist' in the cripantiquity description. I love it. The more I think of the term, the more I love it. It gets away from elitist associations that 'classicist' calls up. 'Ancientist' rather than 'ancient world' gets away from an implication that the ancients 'owned' their world...