Behind “Imagining Autism:” An Interview with Sonya Freeman Loftis

Your host, Dr. Rick Reiman, interviews Dr. Sonya Freeman Loftis, M. Mitchell Endowed Chair of English at Morehouse College, on her journey to explore and enlighten the world about the curiously independent and yet intertwined worlds of Shakespeare and disability studies. An autistic teacher and scholar like the host, Loftis discusses her take on the misunderstandings between neurotypical and neurodivergent and the socially imposed burden on the neurodivergent for decoding these. More specifically she discussed her pioneering book, “Imagining Autism,” and how the varieties of media since have tried to translate autism, in the process both reinforcing pernicious stereotypes of the disabled and more recently enabling autistics to speak for themselves as well as appear as themselves, talking back as the self-representatives that they should always have been. This is the companion audio to my Youtube Video of the conversation, the flagship video on my new channel, “Audibly Seeing,” a visual variant of this podcast. Hope on over to Youtube to view it.