Author: Fergus

Something interesting that we’ve noticed in recent months is that a surprising number of musicians have been making music named after monotropism! Here is a collection of what we’ve noticed as of November 2024. Inclusion is not necessarily endorsement, and some of these tracks may be too noisy for some listeners. Also, we haven’t spoken…

Fergus Murray I posted about recent additions to The Dinah Murray Archive on this site a few weeks ago. At the time, I was drawing a blank on where to find her 1992 and 1993 Durham conference papers, where she first introduced and elaborated on the concept of monotropism. Finally, an old friend pointed out…

Pete Wharmby, autistic author and former English teacher, has written two books that talk about monotropism, and a chapter in a third (see below). I (Fergus Murray) recently had a chat with him about monotropism, education, writing and the internet, for AMASE. We also shared a panel with Elliott Spaeth on neurodiversity in education, at…

Fergus Murray We started this site with all of Dinah’s writing that was already online on her Productive Irritant site, and some of her work that we were able to pull from the Wayback Machine’s archive of her old Autism & Computing site, previously lost to the internet. Panda Mery has been a huge help…

Free online course wins prize For anyone wanting to learn more deeply about Monotropism and what it means for autistic wellbeing, the single best place to go right now is probably Curtin University’s edX course, ‘Autism and Mental Health‘. Wenn Lawson, one of the people who originally developed the theory of Monotropism, was heavily involved…

Fergus Murray We shared a presentation about the Monotropism Questionnaire (MQ) around this time last year. Since then, work has been ongoing on a journal article writing up the results. This is still awaiting peer-review, but is now available on the OSF pre-print server along with the questionnaire itself (see below) which has been made…

A quick round-up of recent work: Tanya Adkin and David Gray-Hammond have both been doing a lot of thinking and writing about monotropism, mental health and burnout on David’s site, Emergent Divergence. The idea of meerkat mode is particulary evocative. David also discusses monotropism in his compelling book of collected essays, The New Normal. Meanwhile…

Damian Milton is editing an anthology on monotropism, The Monotropism Reader, for Pavilion Press in association with PARC (the Participatory Autism Research Collective) and is currently seeking proposals for chapters. The call for proposals closes on the 24th of July. Pavilion previously published The Neurodiversity Reader, on which he was the lead editor. Together with…