Abstract
This chapter sidesteps the pathologizing discourse around stuttering to consider communication in terms of the accident. It argues that stutterers “communicate by accident” in two ways. First, stuttering interrupts linear, goal directed processes and creates pile-ups and other accidents of information-in-transmission. But second, people who stutter often say things they didn’t fully intend and thereby express an involuntary force of life. By tracing the structural conditions of information accidents that get unjustly burdened upon disabled individuals, this chapter rethinks the scene of the accident from the model of communication ritual and suggests that dysfluent accidents might not be a matter of technical difficulty defined by narrow problems like entropy, but socio-cultural dramas that reveal contending forces and desires.
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St. Pierre, J. (2023). Communicating by Accident: Dysfluency, the Non-Essential, and the Catastrophe. In: Jeffress, M.S., Cypher, J.M., Ferris, J., Scott-Pollock, JA. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Disability and Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14447-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14447-9_3
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