TWO NEURODIVERGENT NARRATIVES: SOLO AND EDITED

Professor Hetrick will use her CAS release time appointment to further two ongoing projects. She will continue working on her edited volume tentatively entitled, Neurodivergent Narratives of Navigating Academia: In Our Own Words, composed of the personal narratives and strategies that various neurodivergent faculty use to navigate academia, the accommodations they need to better accomplish their jobs, the perceived strengths their neurotype afforded them in their position, and their insights regarding how academic institutions can better work with and support their neurodivergent faculty. She will also work on finalizing her solo authored book, currently titled A Flamingo Among Penguins: Growing up Undiagnosed Autistic. This autistic autoethnography focuses on her own autistic lived experiences, while keeping her intellectual and speaking privileges in mind, and connects them to wider cultural, political and social meanings, understandings, and conditions. Instead of someone else interviewing her and writing her story from their (neurotypical) perspective, Professor Hetrick owns her own story. Both of these texts answer the call from the autism community for more autistic authors talking about the autistic lived experience. In other words, nothing about us without us.

About the image: This is a Copilot AI (2025) generated image, based on author's prompt, for the book cover of her autoethnography. Every chapter of the book is introduced by a creative writing piece featuring a different bird as a metaphoric representation of a specific autism trait. A Flamingo Among Penguins is the title of the book as well as the creative story initiating the introduction chapter.