Junctions

“Although I have enjoyed this last year in Chittagong enormously, I have resigned my post at Asian University for Women in order to look after my family.” — That’s a brief sentence, and though it is entirely true, it isn’t enough to explain the decisions we as a family have taken. I will not return to promising students and exciting research collaborations in Chittagong; and at the same I find myself drawn onto an unexpected and genuinely challenging path from here on out. This post is by way of an explanation for the sudden change, an apology to those who expected to see me in Chittagong this month, and a hope (I can make no promises!) that some of those collaborations will transform and survive alongside the new lifework my family has.

I came home in May with a few essentials, intending to finish some writing and apply for a grant. More than anything else we were all simply glad that I was coming home. The plan was to decompress, then go to France for a bit, Nepal for a bit, once the children were out of school. Every night in Chittagong I had talked for hours on the videochat with my family, but once I had arrived we slowly grew into focus and saw each other clearly for the first time in a very long year. The stress of separation was unforgiving and revealing.

One of my sons, in particular, had required a full hour of my time every evening, and as the year drew on, I learned that his progress in school had gone from ‘extraordinarily bright but quirky and challenging’ to requiring more serious management. I went to see him at his school during the last six weeks of his academic year, seeing him with an outsider’s eye for the first time: utterly focussed on his work even when other students were trying to tell him I had come into the classroom; puzzled and frustrated to the point of meltdown by social interactions; effortlessly recognising patterns in complex material; full of unabashable joy, sharing a remarkable and intense positivity with his friends.

After meetings with educational psychologists, doctors and other specialists, we now understand that he is on the spectrum, with what sometimes is called Asperger’s. The responses of people around our family have been various and illuminating, from ‘He’s lovely! But how could you not have seen? We certainly did!’ to ‘Oh. I’m so sorry.’ (The former are people we will be glad to learn from; the latter may not get so much of my time from here on out.) I am reading everything I can find, reading up on theories and measurements and politics, suddenly grateful (yet again!) for the Scottish educational system, and learning a great deal about Pokémon, too. As a family we are starting a long journey of learning and adaptation, but it is clear we are all needed here.

(His forceful requirement, when I asked him if was okay for me to write about him and ASD, was that I also write part of the post in Pokémon, which he uses as a remarkably expressive alternative communication/scripting system. With apologies to the uninitiated: Al-tar-i-aaa! Tor-terr-a! And, introducing a new and wholly unlicensed member, Scoddish! Scoddish!).

One particular challenge that we immediately face is that there is little awareness of ASD and considerable stigma across many Asian societies—yet that is where we have deep roots and networks. It is one challenge to advocate in an open society with strong and active commitments to inclusive education and neurodiversity, such as Scotland…it is quite another to confront appalling discrimation and even violence. I cannot yet make sense of how we will try to engage, avoid, transform or otherwise cope with much less supportive social contexts.

Hence I can no longer work for months at a time far away, and have resigned my post at Asian University for Women in order to build a career that allows me to support my family and learn, together with my son, from these new challenges. The management at AUW have been amazing, sympathetic and understanding all the way through, even though AUW runs under impossibly tight constraints. I certainly hope to help out as AUW evolves, in whatever way that may be. I am glad that I had a remarkable year there. It really is one of the last bastions of unalloyed idealism in education, and it does indeed transform both of the women who study there and the societies they return to.

As a teacher, this means that I have to trust a number of remarkable students at AUW to thrive with other lecturers, and sadly I have to postpone, abandon, or re-ground a series of promising collaborations that were developing with colleagues in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the Chittagong Buddhist community, and students at AUW. As a researcher, this means that I am now thinking hard about ASD and will certainly be writing about it here and elsewhere; already I am astonished by the insights into sociability, the transmission of culture, ecological intimacies, and the nature of diversity that ASD unfolds.