Storytelling methods on the move

Abstract

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.