The emergent landscape of autistic communities and autistic studies.

Abstract

I am the younger sister of Hope Block, an autistic woman well into her fifth decade. I had hoped that the two of us would collaborate in a submission to this special issue, but it was not meant to be. We lost our mother just over 2 years ago, in February 2013, and our father passed in May 2014. We are still reeling as a family from these losses, and for Hope it is particularly significant as she no longer has family living near her—I am the closest, at 4 hours away. As depicted in Block (2010), Block et al. (2012b), and Kasnitz and Block (2012), our mom was central to Hope’s communication access by supporting her typing, so her ability to collaborate with me in writing projects has been disrupted. Of course, emotionally, it is harder for us to write about the role of autism and neurodiversity discourses on our family’s life course as we careen down that course with bruising impact—too many changes happening too quickly for scholarly distance. But we are both heartened by the changes we see in how autism is being represented, studied, and lived. I am gratefully excited to be able to participate in this special issue and discuss the twenty-first century emergent landscape of autistic community, autistic studies, and perhaps even ‘‘Autistic Culture.’’ By emergent, I mean both temporally emergent, as in emerged over time and as a result of historical processes, and also emergent in the sense of a gathering critical mass. My scholarship focuses on autism from the perspectives of cultural anthropology and disability studies. Hope and I are in our fifth decade of negotiating autistic and family