Changeling Country: Neurodivergence, Disability and the Irish Imaginary

An edited volume proposed for Vernon Press, Irish Studies series Editor: Tess Ezzy — Director, Neurodivergent Creative Methods Lab; PhD candidate, University of New England

The changeling — the fairy substitute left in the cradle when the real child is stolen — is Ireland's oldest figure for the child who does not develop on schedule, who does not return affection in the expected register, who stims, who is silent or uncanny in speech. Before diagnosis there was folklore, and the folklore was frequently lethal.

Changeling Country reads Ireland through neurodivergence and disability, taking the changeling as both subject and method. It follows that figure out of the cradle and across an entire culture: into law, religion, the asylum and the institution, literary form, screen media, the diaspora, and finally into the hands of the neurodivergent and disabled Irish artists now reclaiming it. The volume's wager is that a national imaginary can be read through the minds it once tried to drive out.

The collection consolidates a dispersed conversation — the reading of the changeling as a pre-scientific account of developmental difference, best known from a brief clinical note (Leask, Leask and Silove, 2005) and since circulated mainly through folklore scholarship and activist video essays — into a sustained scholarly object that takes Ireland as a whole culture and supplies a theoretical frame where the literature has mostly offered analogy. It joins the archive of historical harm to the present work of reclamation, so that the book argues rather than merely surveys.

Framework

The volume's organising apparatus is Critical Neurodivergent Studies (CNS), positioned at the hinge with disability and crip theory. Contributors are invited to put four CNS concepts to work:

• neuronormativity — the unmarked standard of mind against which the changeling is found wanting;
• neurocapture — the institutional machinery that detains, classifies and cures the divergent;
• neurocrip — the deliberate seam between neurodivergence and crip, suited to Ireland's blended histories of intellectual, psychiatric and physical disability;
• the littorascene — the threshold zone of strand, shore and crossing that is the changeling's native geography and Ireland's defining edge.

Familiarity with these terms is welcome but not required; the editor's introduction will establish them, and proposals that engage the concepts loosely or critically are as welcome as those that adopt them directly.

We invite proposals on themes including, but not limited to:

The changeling as method

• The changeling in the Irish folk record, read as a historical account of difference
• Cure, harm and disposability, including the 1895 killing of Bridget Cleary
• The historical logic of cure against the contemporary refusal of cure

Institutions and power

• The asylum, the county home, the industrial school as a carceral-care complex
• Theologies of the soulless or sinful child
• The legal category of the feeble-minded: capacity, wardship, exclusion

Form and language

• A neurodivergent grammar in Irish literary modernism (Beckett's repetition and stasis; Joyce's sensory saturation)
• Yeats and the romantic changeling
• Non-standard communication and speech in Irish-language writing

Across the water

• The migrant as changeling: diaspora and substitution
• Screen Ireland and neurodivergent self-representation
• Island, strand and shore: the littorascene and threshold geography

Reclamation

• The changeling reclaimed as affirmative kin in contemporary disability-arts practice and Irish writing

Interdisciplinary and practice-led contributions are encouraged. We particularly welcome proposals from neurodivergent and disabled scholars and artists, and from early-career researchers. The volume treats histories of harm to disabled children with the seriousness they require and centres neurodivergent and disabled voices throughout.

Submission details

• Abstract: 300–500 words, outlining your chapter's argument, primary material and engagement with the volume's frame
• Short bio: approx. 100 words, including affiliation (if any) and ORCID where available
• Final chapters: 6,000–7,000 words, due January 2027
• Send to: tcaloped@myune.edu.au with the subject line Changeling Country — proposal

Timeline

• Proposal deadline: 30 September 2026
• Notification of acceptance: mid-to-late November 2026
• Full drafts due: January 2027
• Double-blind peer review and revision: to follow
• (This schedule is contingent on the volume's commissioning by Vernon Press; contributors will be kept informed of any change.)

Editor

Tess Ezzy is the originator of Critical Neurodivergent Studies and directs the Neurodivergent Creative Methods Lab. She is the author of two monographs forthcoming with Vernon Press in 2027, Critical Neurodivergent Studies and Making a Spectacle of the Self, and of Burnout Machines, under contract with Intellect. She is a researcher at the University of New England and a Greek-Australian writer based on Darug Country in western Sydney.

Informal enquiries are warmly welcomed in advance of the deadline.