Michael Bakan: Autism, Ethnomusicology, and the New Normal of Disability (May 23, 4PM)

Drumming Up Some Difference: Autism, Ethnomusicology, and the New Normal of Disability

A Talk By:
Michael B. Bakan (College of Music, Florida State University)

Date: Thursday, May 23, 2013
Time: 4:00pm
Location: 701C Dodge Hall (Center for Ethnomusicology)
Free and open to the public

In popular and medical-scientific discourses alike, the term autism is ineluctably associated with a dense clustering of ostensibly related terms including disability, disorder, and impairment. Indeed, a principal development in autism-related research and clinical practice of recent decades has been a progressive movement away from conceptualizing autism as a single condition and toward recognition of a heterogeneous range of autistic conditions collectively assembled under the rubric of ASD, or autism spectrum disorders.

This paradigm shift from autism to ASD has had profound implications in terms of fostering more sophisticated and more humane social, medical, therapeutic, and academic perspectives and approaches in areas of study, treatment, and public policy. Yet for all such developments, a symptomatic reading of the behaviors, values, and life prospects of persons labeled autistic remains so deeply entrenched and normative in the public imaginary that any alternative epistemology of autistic personhood is rendered essentially untenable.

This, at least, has been the case historically until very recently, but across many sectors today--from advocacy groups comprising people on the autism spectrum; to scholars in fields such as disability studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, and literary criticism; to the authors and creators of an ever growing body of autism-related memoirs, blogs, documentary films, and other media--the lives and experiences of people identified in one way or another as "autistic" are being recast and re-presented in radically new, and radicalizing, ways. From this alternative vantage point, autism is read not symptomatically, but rather culturally and humanistically: to be autistic is simply one among many intertwined ways of being human, so that the goal should not be to "fix," "treat," or "improve" autistic modes of personhood, but instead to better understand and appreciate them. As with all people, people on the spectrum want and deserve to be met where they are, to be valued for who they are, and to be accepted for what and how they are.

The cornerstone methods of ethnomusicology--musical experience and ethnography--offer poignant opportunities for creating community and mutual understanding among people with and without ASDs, while the priorities of applied ethnomusicology--of putting ethnomusicological research to practical use
--provide a powerful vehicle for enacting and promoting forms of social activism that model autistic experience and praxis in terms of ability, creativity, cultural competence, and social agency, rather than in relation to the more customary tropes of disability, rigidity, isolationism, and social exclusion. Through an exploration of his ethnomusicological research on ASD and his experiences performing music with children labeled autistic over the past decade, Michael Bakan will present a compelling and evocative portrait of how music lives in the lives of people who make and experience it, and of how people live in the music they make. You will never see autism, or the people who "have" it, the same way again.  

Michael Bakan BIOGRAPHY
Michael Bakan is Professor of Ethnomusicology and Head of World Music in the College of Music at Florida State University. He is the author of the book Music of Death and New Creation: Experiences in the World of Balinese Gamelan Beleganjur (Chicago 1999),  which was selected to the Choice Outstanding Academic Titles list for the year 2000 and reviewed in The Times (London) as one of the two "most significant publications on Balinese music in almost half a century"; and of the textbook World Music: Traditions and Transformations, which is now in its second edition with McGraw-Hill (2012) and has been adopted at more than 150 universities nationwide and internationally. Bakan is the director of the Artism Ensemble, a unique music performance collective featuring children on the autism spectrum, their co-participating parents, and professional musicians from diverse world cultures. His current research on the ethnomusicology of autism is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and other agencies. It has yielded several publications in leading scholarly journals and edited volumes. He also directs the Sekaa Gong Hanuman Agung Balinese gamelan and the Omnimusica Intercultural Ensemble at FSU, serves as series editor for the Routledge Focus on World Music book series, and formerly served as president of the Southeast/Caribbean Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology. He has been an invited speaker or visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, the Berklee College of Music, and numerous other institutions. Bakan maintains a personal website at www.michaelbakan.com.