Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting.

This seminar examines the emerging concepts of neurodiversity and neurodivergence—terms originally developed by autistic activists and self-advocates seeking to depathologize autism and other forms of neurological, mental, and cognitive difference. Readings will incorporate perspectives from a wide range of research programs, including disability studies, anthropology, rhetoric, and critical theory. I hope the seminar will be of interest for students intending to major in medical anthropology and/or minor in Disability Studies, Applied Language Studies, Education. Laura Sterponi is Professor of Language Literacy and Culture at the University of California, Berkeley (Institute of Human Development; Graduate School of Education; Anthropology Department). She combines methods from Interactional Linguistics, Conversation Analysis, and Linguistic Anthropology to investigate naturally occurring uses of language, oral and written, in a range of institutional contexts and with different populations. Her research portfolio includes empirical studies of language in autism, language and literacy ideologies in educational settings, and communication in healthcare encounters. She has carried out a number of studies that augment traditional research on autism: (1) by discerning dimensions of communicative competence in autistic children that were previously undocumented and largely unrecognized; and (2) by identifying interactional processes that have a bearing on the manifestation of autistic language. Faculty web site: www.sterponi.com