Today’s episode argues for a radical re-evaluation of sounds and behaviours often dismissed as “noise” or symptoms of pathology, particularly within the context of autistic and gestalt ways of knowing. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, contends that the “hum,” repetition, and scripting frequently labelled as nonfunctional or disruptive are actually forms of coherence, communication, and self-regulation that precede conventional language. Dr. Hoerricks advocates for refusal as an ethical method—resisting the pressure to translate these intrinsic communication forms into the linear, quantifiable language preferred by “colonial” research and institutional systems, which seek to capture and control meaning. Instead, she urges practitioners and researchers to practice attunement and relational listening to these “signals,” emphasising that meaning lives in pattern and atmosphere, not just in parsed words, and that sovereignty requires protecting one’s cognitive ecology from external enclosure.

Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/the-noise-we-keep-on-refusal-as-method

Let me know what you think.

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