NEWS

PhD in Artistic Research
2024-2028
Faculty of Contemporary Art / University of Bergen, NO

PhD title: Beyond the Normative Human

Beyond the Normative Human is an artistic PhD project that explores the political and aesthetic potential of neurological difference through relational sound practices, performance, and collaborative modes of inquiry.

The research investigates how neurotypical modes of thinking, perceiving, communicating, and relating become institutionally stabilized as normative measures of the human. Drawing on process-relational philosophies, particularly the work of Erin Manning, the project engages neurological difference as a site from which dominant configurations of subjectivity, embodiment, and sociality can be reconsidered.

Rather than approaching autism and other forms of neurological difference through frameworks of deficit or disorder, the project understands neurodiversity as a generative force capable of reconfiguring relations and opening alternative ways of sensing, knowing, and being together. In this sense, neurological difference becomes not an exception to the social body but a catalyst for its transformation.

Grounded in autoethnographic research emerging from lived experience with autism, the project develops a relational methodology that treats neurological difference not as an object of study but as a field of experience. Through artistic experimentation, embodied documentation, and situated reflection, it explores how diverse neurological attunements reshape perception, temporality, communication, and collective experience.

By bringing together artistic practice, critical theory, and lived relational experience, Beyond the Normative Human asks: What new forms of sociality become possible when neurological difference is approached as a political and aesthetic force rather than a pathology?

How might neurodiverse modes of relation contribute to the invention of more expansive ecologies of experience and ways of being human?