29th August 2024, 3PM-4PM (UTC+01:00) join via link:  https://aarhusuniversity.zoom.us/j/65292867848  

Presented by: Cheryl Mattingly, professor of anthropology, University of Southern California and Professor of anthropology and philosophy, Aarhus University

When Andy was nine, he went on his first ski trip. His parents, Tanya and Frank, were utterly astonished by his experience, hearing his first joyful laugh as he flew down the mountain in an adaptive chair. Andy is quadriplegic, non-verbal, and cortically blind. Frank describes their shock witnessing his descent down the snowy slope. "I never heard him laugh like that before. And then we, everybody was crying...And he was happy." Frank emphasizes the word "happy." 

In this talk, I call upon the phenomenologist, Jean-Luc Nancy, to explore this unexpected experience in which parents encounter a child they have never met before. For Nancy, an "event of surprise" contains a paradox: the impossible (that which cannot be anticipated) actually occurs.  This event of surprise also reveals a feature of neurodiverse relationality that Nancy helps to illuminate: relational "plurality." Andy's presence complicates the idea of a familial "we" as a "mutuality of being" based upon likeness or resemblance. Tanya and Frank are regularly challenged when trying to anticipate their son's sensory responses to the world around him precisely because he experiences the world very differently than they do. Connecting to Andy means cultivating a "neurocosmopolitan" mode of family life, to borrow the vocabulary of disability activists. As I will try to show, events that cannot be anticipated, like Andy's first laugh, can sometimes expand a family's and even a community's neurocosmopolitan possibilities.