Affective intensities and autistic misfitting: on surviving violence at school

The aim of this narrative review was to examine intersectionality within critical autism studies. A growing body of evidence has demonstrated the importance of intersectional frameworks in highlighting the diverse experiences of marginalized communities. Many disability studies researchers investigated intersectionality to elucidate the impact of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other constructs on disability identification. Within critical autism studies, a field that emerged to challenge the deficit-laden, pathologizing autism discourses favored by the medical community, intersectionality has started to become an integral component of the literature. This review highlights intersectional frameworks utilized to explore autism in both academic and nonacademic contexts, to provide a foundation for future study. Upon analysis, we found overarching themes regarding the explicit, implicit, and descriptive approaches to intersectionality, racial and gender biases within critical autism studies, and the multidisciplinary nature of intersectionality and critical autism studies. We finish the review with recommendations for how to more fully address the experiences of all autistic people-particularly of racial, gender, and sexual minority individuals-in future study. Our recommendations include utilizing intersectionality as an analytical lens for describing previously overlooked phenomena and questioning central tenets of methodology and processes, including developing research questions, analyzing data, and writing results.

This article takes up multimedia storytelling and interference as methods on the move in and beyond critical Autism studies and considers their contributions to post and qualitative studies in education. We write as a collective of Autistic and non-Autistic researchers, kin, artists, and educators. We think generatively about the tensions of trying to do anti-normative research through a multimedia storytelling project about Autism justice in education within the confines of academic spaces across differing relationalities to Autism. We situate our method within new materialist ontology, homing in on the concept of “interference”—something we believe has not been done within critical Autism studies before—considering what interference as metaphor and method might offer our analytic approach that diffraction alone might miss. Through analyzing core tensions in the research process and in three films made by Autistic participant-storytellers, we show how Autism flows together and/or collides with storytelling and other post/qualitative methods to make new story forms and modes, and with these, new patterns for understanding Autism and justice in research and education. Our aim is transformative—to open space through post/qualitative research processes for Autistic perspectives and to release multiple stories of Autism into the world. In this we lean into interference and the tangle of research and relationality, power, and possibility for more innovative, just, and critically hopeful knowledge and practice.

Critical autism studies (CAS) is an emergent field that challenges deficit-based thinking about autism. Early scholars of autism, such as psychologists Bruno Bettelheim, Leo Kanner, or Ivar O. Lovaas, adopted a biomedical or behavioral approach to the study of autism. Rejecting such an approach, critical disability studies and by extension CAS have developed robust theoretical frameworks to account for the sociocultural and embodied experience of disability, including the social model of disability, the cultural model of disability, and poststructural models of disability. These approaches to the study of disability challenge medical models of disability that understand disability as an individual experience of impairment. Disability is framed as a problem to be solved via biomedicine and helping professionals and instead conceive of disability as a web of sociocultural entanglements. In contrast, theoretical approaches to critical autism studies include critical discourse analysis (CDA), feminist theory, and critical race theory. Scholars using CDA explore how ableism is produced and sustained through discourses, particularly public discourses within the media, scholarship, non-governmental organizations, and schools. Critical autism scholars who employ critical race theory seek to understand the intersectional identities of autistic people of color and the compounding effects of racism and ableism. Feminist approaches to the study of autism trouble gender stereotypes about autistic people, most notably Simon Baron Cohen’s extreme male brain theory.

This chapter begins with a digital story made as part of the Re•Storying Autism in Education project by Nick Hodge. These short first-person multimedia videos about autism and education offer new ways of knowing, and trouble, disrupt and reform the dominant cultural scripts of autism such as autism as biomedical disorder, brain difference and insidious child stealer (Douglas et al. 2019). Hodge’s digital story invites us to reflect on and problematise everyday examples of teacher talk. Critical Autism Studies is employed as a methodological tool to analyse how in classroom chatter the apparently mundane and ordinary in fact conceal and reproduce dominant disabling discourses that deny autistic children personhood and position them as other and problem. Statements, such as ‘careful she’s a biter’ and ‘he’s one of our special needs’ swirl around children and then land and may be absorbed. The danger is they may become internalised as the structures of who children come to think they are and form the boundaries of who they may come to be. We asked for examples of teacher talk that autistic people have experienced and which they feel harmed their sense of who they are on Twitter. We employ CAS to identify the disabling structures that permit and sustain such teacher-talk. In doing so, we extend its reach beyond the theoretical to propose new ways of talking to and about children in class that validate and empower rather than reduce and deny. Keywords: Critical Autism Studies, multimedia storytelling, teacher-talk

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as a tool for participatory research within Critical Autism Studies: A systematic review

Intersectionality on the Horizon: Exploring Autism in Adulthood from a Unique Vantage Point.

Applied behaviour analysis and critical autism studies are generally assumed to find no common ground on the question of autism support strategies. With the core conviction that no autism support or intervention that seeks to normalise autistic people can ever be considered neurodiversity-affirming, two critical autism scholars and two BCBA behavioural analysts discuss how and why ABA needs to evolve to serve its main clients: autistic people. Building on a question-and-answer exchange between the two groups, this article is a cautious collaboration between these two apparently opposing groups, with the objective of discussing whether ABA can evolve and what it would take to do so. This article, one of two generated by this exchange, speaks to critical autism scholars and urges further critical engagement with those factions of the ABA industry seeking to take autism-centred approaches to autism support. A separate paper will speak to the ABA community.

The place of emotions in critical autism studies: Interdisciplinary Workshop on Critical Autism Studies: Enabling Inclusion, Defending Difference. University of Ottawa, September 24–25, 2010

In this article, I present my journey of late diagnosis of autism employing autoethnography with video performance, affects and the concept and practice of “neuroqueering”. Within the framework of Performative New Materialism, the neurodiversity paradigm and Critical Autism Studies, I try to respond to the cultural narratives created by non-autistic authoritarian figures, generate a different point of view within Critical Autism Studies by correlating the autistic experience with affects, and give a step forward in changing how the autistic experience is culturally researched, written about and spoken of.

This chapter explores an exciting new field of Critical Autism Studies (CAS), a movement of adults with autism, parents, psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, disabled activists and social scientists creating a new narrative around autism and challenging existing orthodoxy in autism studies that turns autistic persons into ‘brains’ (neuroscience) or ‘things’ (a set of diagnostic categories of mental disorders). This movement refocuses our attention on the humanity and interpersonal relationships of people with autism and the multitude of relationships they encounter through various health services. Robot therapy is built on problematic foundations that view people with autism as lacking in empathy or meaningful sociality. CAS could provide the template for breaking away from the dehumanising descriptions of autistic persons towards an integrative humanistic paradigm.

Two articles by autistic authors but with very different views were published in the March 2018 volume of Disability & Society. One article expressed concern that there is a growing disdain for scientific knowledge among autistic autism researchers and an atmosphere of hostility towards non-autistic autism researchers. The other article provides concrete evidence of these concerns. It attacks the scholarship of non-autistic authors whose work offends them and proposes that non-autistic authors be excluded from ‘Critical Autism Studies’. This Current Issues present article critiques these two publications and proposes a way forward that involves critical thinking and proposing alternative interpretations. A couple of examples of what this might look like are given. The article argues that both autistic and non-autistic researchers have a part to play in moving knowledge about autism forward and both should be allowed to critique the other.

Building on work in feminist studies, queer studies and critical race theory, this volume challenges the universality of propositions about human nature, by questioning the boundaries between predominant neurotypes and ‘others’, including dyslexics, autistics and ADHDers. This is the first work of its kind to bring cutting-edge research across disciplines to the concept of neurodiversity. It offers in-depth explorations of the themes of cure/prevention/eugenics; neurodivergent wellbeing; cross-neurotype communication; neurodiversity at work; and challenging brain-bound cognition. It analyses the role of neuro-normativity in theorising agency, and a proposal for a new alliance between the Hearing Voices Movement and neurodiversity. In doing so, we contribute to a cultural imperative to redefine what it means to be human. To this end, we propose a new field of enquiry that finds ways to support the inclusion of neurodivergent perspectives in knowledge production, and which questions the theoretical and mythological assumptions that produce the idea of the neurotypical. Working at the crossroads between sociology, critical psychology, medical humanities, critical disability studies, and critical autism studies, and sharing theoretical ground with critical race studies and critical queer studies, the proposed new field – neurodiversity studies – will be of interest to people working in all these areas.

This article explores the definition of Critical Autism Studies and its inclusion in autistic scholarship. There has been critique of recent non-autistic literature for lacking autistic authorship, leading to doubts about its epistemological integrity due to misrepresentations of autistic culture and the neurodiversity movement. This article utilises the work of Arnold, Milton and O’Dell et al. to introduce an emancipatory definition to ensure the discipline is autistic led. In the process, we discuss the nature of autism studies and what constitutes critical literature. We propose Waltz’s interpretation of Critical Autism Studies as a working definition.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine current research on self-advocacy and self-determination of autistic students in order to provide an overview of the research and to critically evaluate researcher’s methods of inclusivity of autistic people. Additionally, this paper will critically analyse the discourse of the current research to assess the extent of deficit, stigma and pathology discourse.Design/methodology/approachResearch will be selected from a list of criteria which is to seek research that is inclusive of autistic people. The research will be analysed using elements of critical discourse analysis, critical disability studies and critical autism studies. The critical autism studies approach used in this paper is emancipatory to promote autistic scholarship, autistic inclusivity and autistic led research methods.FindingsThe result of this paper is that by prioritising, and including autistic individuals in the studies about them provides valuable educational insights and often challenges assumptions, stigmas and stereotypes of autistic individuals.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings of the paper may be limited by the selection of literature reviewed and generalizability, therefore, researchers are encouraged to explore further.Practical implicationsThis paper holds potential implications that question the consistency of current discourse and research into self-advocacy for autistic individuals in addition to providing effective research, teaching and support strategies based on insight. This paper also highlights some research that challenges assumptions of autistic individuals.Social implicationsThis paper challenges assumptions and stigmas associated with autistic individuals and demonstrates the importance of self-advocacy and self-determination. This research transforms the paradigm of autism and education practice that has the potential to improve autistic individuals’ education and ultimately, improve their lives.Originality/valueThis research is important and valuable as there is limited research in this area. The potential of this research is that it can shift the broad perceptions of autism and make improvements in education and autistic individuals lives.

In this introductory chapter, we trace the development of critical autism studies from the early 1990s and the creation of the Autism Network International to the current day, highlighting controversies and contradictions inherent within a field that has been differently interpreted and appropriated by autistic and non-autistic academics and activists. We argue critical autism studies offer potential and possibilities to continue to seek the emancipation of autistic people, focus on intersectionality and injustices, and for academics who are autistic and non-autistic to work together in producing important scholarship that has reach and impact. We further underline the importance of strengthening and legitimising activism within the academy and beyond, which the broad range of perspectives within this volume will contribute to.