Strange Harbors, Magic Rivers and Contested Twilights: Role-Play, Culture and Transformation in an Asperger Summer Camp
Elizabeth Nickrenz, University of Chicago
How do the worlds we occupy shape the roles we play? How do our individual characteristics and shared abilities create possibilities for new kinds of roles and relationships? The exciting emergence of work on the construction of disabilities in medical, occupational and educational settings has helped to illuminate and foreground this question. What can other kinds of settings, with novel sets of
expectations and approaches, tell us about the way neurodiversity" shapes and is shaped by social context?
This paper presents preliminary findings from five weeks of participant observation with a group I will call the Journeyfolk. Through annual summer camps and meetings throughout the year, the group creates and shares an interactive world of fantasy, creating characters and enacting relationships within collectively created worlds of spellcasting, swordfighting, and mystery.
Two years ago, this close-knit community started an offshoot of their summer camps targeted toward teenagers with Asperger's and other related autism spectrum disorders. This presentation chronicles the tale of my own adventure, balancing the roles of staff psychologist, community newcomer, Troll Warrior, Valkyrie, ethnographer and Goddess of Twilight at the Summer Journey
Asperger Camp. As campers and staff negotiated the boundaries and governing logics of the worlds we created and inhabited, confronting the consequences of both tremendous powers and frightening vulnerability, we also negotiated a variety of cross-cultural encounters, between the spontaneity of the Journeyfolk
ethos and the meticulous preparation, order, and routine of empirically validated "best practices" for autism spectrum disorders. How rigidly should we maintain boundaries - between rules and exceptions, between wizards and warriors, between fantasy and reality, between afternoon and evening activities,
between campers and staff? What power is needed to keep the borders strong, and what kinds of ideas about safety and health do these boundaries presuppose? And overall, what can this transformative learning experience teach us about alternative ways to conceptualize autism, and its power to catalyze both creative and destructive change?
