Art Education Professor Dr. Laura Hetrick named a 2025-2026 Center for Advanced Study Associate

Art Education Professor Dr. Laura Hetrick named a 2025-2026 Center for Advanced Study Associate.

CAS Associates are tenured University of Illinois faculty members whose proposals are selected in an annual competition. These appointments grant one semester of teaching release time in order to pursue an individual scholarly or creative project. With the Professors and Fellows, they form the core of the Center for Advanced Study Community. Associates also participate in a yearly roundtable discussion of research interests and are invited to offer a future CAS presentation.

https://cas.illinois.edu/person/laura-hetrick

Professor Hetrick will use her CAS release time appointment to further two ongoing projects. She will continue working on her edited volume tentatively entitled, Neurodivergent Narratives of Navigating Academia: In Our Own Words, composed of the personal narratives and strategies that various neurodivergent faculty use to navigate academia, the accommodations they need to better accomplish their jobs, the perceived strengths their neurotype afforded them in their position, and their insights regarding how academic institutions can better work with and support their neurodivergent faculty. She will also work on finalizing her solo authored book, currently titled A Flamingo Among Penguins: Growing up Undiagnosed Autistic. This autistic autoethnography focuses on her own autistic lived experiences, while keeping her intellectual and speaking privileges in mind, and connects them to wider cultural, political and social meanings, understandings, and conditions. Instead of someone else interviewing her and writing her story from their (neurotypical) perspective, Professor Hetrick owns her own story. Both of these texts answer the call from the autism community for more autistic authors talking about the autistic lived experience. In other words, nothing about us without us.