Creativity and Community among Autism-Spectrum Youth Creating Positive Social Updrafts through Play and Performance

This edited volume explores the roles of socially-channeled play and performance in the developmental trajectories of young people who fall on the autism spectrum. The contributors offer possibilities for channels of activity through which youth on the autism spectrum may find acceptance, affirmation, and kinship with others. "Positive social updraft" characterizes the social channels through which people of difference might be swept up into broader cultural currents such that they feel valued, appreciated, and empowered. A social updraft provides cultural meditational means that include people in a current headed "upward," allowing people of atypical makeups to become fully involved in significant cultural activity that brings them a feeling of social belonging.

Introduction .- Toward a Social Understanding of Mental Health .- The Problem of Adaptation in Socializing People of Difference  .- Social Therapy and Family Play .- Shakespeare and Autism: Exploring Expression, Communication and Re-envisioning the Inclusive Community .- We Don't Want to Fit In: A Reflection on the Revolutionary Inclusive Theatre Practices of The Miracle Project and Actionplay for Adolescents on the Autism Spectrum .- The DisAbility Project: A Model for Autism-Specific Creativity and Civic Engagement within the Broader Context of Difference .- Curious Incidents: Pretend Play, Presence and Performance Pedagogies in Encounters with Autism .- The Collaborative Online Anime Community as Positive Social Updraft .- Composing Poetry and A Writer’s Identity: Positive Social Updrafts in a Community of Writers .- An Autistic Life, Animated through the World of Disney: A Loving Autoethnography. 

Peter Smagorinsky is Distinguished Research Professor of English Education at The University of Georgia, USA. His research considers the notion of “mental health” in terms of cultivating the assets of people of anomalous frames of mind.