Author: Melanie Yergeau File Type: pdf In Authoring Autism Melanie Yergeau defines neurodivergence as an identityneuroqueernessrather than an impairment. Using a queer theory framework, Yergeau notes the stereotypes that deny autistic people their humanity and the chance to define themselves while also challenging cognitive studies scholarship and its reification of the neurological passivity of autistics. She also critiques early intensive behavioral interventionswhich have much in common with gay conversion therapyand questions the ableist privileging of intentionality and diplomacy in rhetorical traditions. Using storying as her method, she presents an alternative view of autistic rhetoricity by foregrounding the cunning rhetorical abilities of autistics and by framing autism as a narrative condition wherein autistics are the best-equipped people to define their experience. Contending that autism represents a queer way of being that simultaneously embraces and rejects the rhetorical, Yergeau shows how autistic people queer the lines of rhetoric, humanity, and agency. In so doing, she demonstrates how an autistic rhetoric requires the reconceptualization of rhetorics very essence.**ReviewWith philosophical and rhetorical acuity and a large dose of humor, Melanie Yergeau interweaves autism research into other areas of thought, providing new ways of thinking about rhetoric, queerness, and neurology. This is without doubt the most thoroughgoing, rigorous, and creative work on authoring autism I have read. As a reader I have been changed, my attention drawn to the necessity to attend not only to the style, and to writing, but to the terms according to which some of us are given access to these voices we too often take for granted.(Erin Manning, author of The Minor Gesture) With incandescent wit and defiant exuberance, Melanie Yergeau employs her rhetorical scalpel to dismantle the clinical assumptions and cultural stereotypes that have been used to deny, dismiss, and obscure the basic humanity of autistic people for generations. This is not just a landmark book its a book that opens up a whole terrain of discourse informed by the insights of queer theory and the disability rights movement.(Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity) About the Author Melanie Yergeau is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan.

Author: Ross Bassett File Type: pdf In the late 1800s, Indians seemed to be a people left behind by the Industrial Revolution, dismissed as not a mechanical race. Today Indians are among the worlds leaders in engineering and technology. In this international history spanning nearly 150 years, Ross Bassettdrawing on a unique database of every Indian to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between its founding and 2000charts their ascent to the pinnacle of high-tech professions. As a group of Indians sought a way forward for their country, they saw a future in technology. Bassett examines the tensions and surprising congruences between this technological vision and Mahatma Gandhis nonindustrial modernity. Indias first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, sought to use MIT-trained engineers to build an India where the government controlled technology for the benefit of the people. In the private sector, Indian business families sent their sons to MIT, while MIT graduates established Indias information technology industry. By the 1960s, students from the Indian Institutes of Technology (modeled on MIT) were drawn to the United States for graduate training, and many of them stayed, as prominent industrialists, academics, and entrepreneurs. The MIT-educated Indian engineer became an integral part of a global system of technology-based capitalism and focused less on India and its problemsa technological Indian created at the expense of a technological India. **