The Autism Café is a creative arts and crafts afternoon with young women. It is organised by the Law and Criminology Dept and the Legal Advice Centre, working in collaboration with the Sycamore Trust
This news article was written by Prof. Jill Marshall and Ms. Mariam Diaby
Our everyday habits, challenges, objects, and environments are rarely questioned. Such ordinary things tend to be taken for granted due to bigger, more dramatic events taking centre stage in informing us about the world. However, the size of an event in our lives does not always determine its value to it. The value given to those things around us depends on our perspective. A deeper probe into these often overlooked ordinary matters that form the very fabric of our lives and society may provide us with a unique insight into our communities and ourselves.
Examining the habitual can enlighten us about our identity and social structures. Prof. Jill Marshall has been analysing the place of the ordinary, everyday objects around us particularly focusing on Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces, and Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey around My Room, connecting these to law. Prof. Marshall explains that COVID-19 lockdown has been the catalyst. “This forced physical confinement on those of us previously free to move to different spaces and places. Illness aside, to those complying with the legal regulations, the lockdown has restricted our ability to meet, associate and assemble, with others including with family, friends, loved ones. We stayed in those spaces and surroundings in which we were placed at time of lockdown, for most, one’s own home. Being alive and living well depends on legal, social and cultural contexts or environments where our individual personalities are formed and have potential to flourish. Can a focus on the ‘infra-ordinary’ of the everyday, and our awareness of it, shed light on the deficiencies of the world in which we exist: a world which is shaped and regulated by law?” (Marshall 2021). Prof. Marshall’s research is the basis of the Autism Café.
What is the Autism Café? This is a creative arts and crafts afternoon session hosted by the charity Sycamore Trust, the Department of Law and Criminology and the Legal Advice Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London, as well as the Autism Hub run by the Sycamore Trust in Romford, Essex. Sycamore Trust is dedicated to providing a variety of tailored services to support families, carers and individuals affected by Autistic Spectrum Disorders. Services offered by the organisation range from Parent Support Groups, Youth Clubs to a Girls Project – a scheme designed exclusively for girls and young women on the autistic spectrum. There are often difficulties in diagnosing the developmental disorder amongst girls and young women and the Autism Café was arranged for this group. The Sycamore Trust aims to raise awareness about autism in general and we will be continuing our work with them in the future.
Participants at the Café are encouraged to share their experiences and thoughts about their daily lives and challenges in creative ways bringing new perspectives to whose voices count in shaping the law. Exploring the unquestioned and mundane help us discover how we perceive ourselves. It can enhance empathy and understanding of others’ perspectives and our awareness of the material world in which we live. Engaging in these discussions enables us to explore what we can learn about the way law regulates our behaviour and if that corresponds to our own understandings of our world so that new light can be shone on law to learn and study its objectives as well as its problems using creative methods. Exploring the ordinary in our lives can serve as a basis to critique the law then shape it in a way that best reflects and protects us.
For further information please contact Prof. Marshall at jill.marshall@rhul.ac.uk
This project is kindly funded by the School of Law and Social Science Reid Research Fund; Ms Nicola Antoniou and Professor Jill Marshall co-investigators, Ms Mariam Diaby, research assistant.
J Marshall ‘Law, everyday spaces and objects, and being human’ (forthcoming publication 2021/2) – Paper presented at the IALS Director’s Series Law and the Humanities in the Pandemic. https://ials.sas.ac.uk/events/research-workshops-training-seminars-and-lecture-series/directors-series-202021-law
