Neurodiversity and Communication Ethics: How Images of Autism Trouble Communication Ethics in the Globital Age

Abstract

While research has addressed the ways in which autism is represented in popular culture, in literature and in film, this article points to how autistic cultural assemblages afforded by the unevenly global-digital or globital age act to queer neurotypical communication and media ethics more broadly. The article argues that evidence points to the emergence of new human communication ethics that embraces neurodiversity and that values the sensorial, perceptual, cognitive and communicative variety of human meaning making as well as including the communicative affordances of non-human persons and our environment. . Since communication and ethics are configured through a culture of ‘normalcy’ this article asks how images about, by and with people with autism invite a reorientation of ethical assumptions about images more widely. How do new kinds of digital images of autistic people made possible through the affordances of the globital age trouble or rather unsettle not only a history of troubled images of autistic people in medicine and popular culture but also ontologically challenge the human-centric and neurotypical bias of communication ethics? The article draws on self-advocacy You Tube videos made by and with autistic people, a campaign video made by the UK’s National Autistic Society, and films as ‘translations’ of a nonverbal autistic world to suggest these unsettle and queer a genealogy and history of troubled images of autistic people .