From Playing with Power to Interacting with Autism: Developmental Tales of Transformers and Neurodiversity

From Playing with Power to Interacting with Autism: Developmental Tales of Transformers and Neurodiversity

Marsha Kinder (Critical Studies, University of Southern California)
Friday, November 15, 2013 / 1:00 PM
SSMS 2135

This talk traces the speaker’s movement from a book published in the early 1990s on children’s media culture—Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—to a video-based website launched this September on Interacting with Autism, which is primarily addressed to individuals on the spectrum and their families, teachers and healthcare workers.  Despite the obvious transmedial moves from book to website, from cultural studies to documentary production, and from movies, television and electronic games to neuroscience, therapy and ethnography, the through-line is a developmental theory of narrative that generates a distinctive mode of subjectivity embodied in transformers, that fosters neurodiversity and privileges autobiography as a genre.  In this talk Kinder explores what’s at stake for all of us  in the current cultural debate over whether autism is a disorder or a form of neurodiversity.

Sponsored by the Dept. of Film and Media Studies and the IHC series The Value of Care.