Theorizing Autistic Sexualities as Collective Poetic Experiences

This article is a palimpsest emerging as part of a project of collective autoethnographic writing on the theme of sexuality. It draws on the intensification of friendly writing, friendly as in friends with benefits. We write as autistic and neuroqueer subjects, writing until our textualities becomes sexualities. We write until the text becomes a room – call it Earth or call it Body, call it Brain or call it Heart – in which one could crack meanings―but these are not the most important ones. Instead of meanings and positions, we want to write about movements in time. The time it takes to read a body that is never a body of your own but a part of a tiny orchestra. The time it takes to formulate a voice that speaks through mutism. This peculiar collection of letters works with our writing subjects as moments of memories. Reliving sexual moments – renaming sexual moments as sexual moments. Writing becomes an act of embodied and embrained tension and fusing. Maybe the text will revive in your hands—by reading it, you will write another version with us, of you. We are sensory strangers fucking through texts. Come play with us

Introducing normative and different childhoods, developmental trajectory and transgression

This chapter discusses the difference and transgression through a series of empirical, conceptual and literature-based exemplars. It addresses the ways in which normative ideas about childhood impact on understandings of particular kinds of children and set up assumptions about the norms against which 'others' are judged. The chapters draws on a range of dimensions of difference, including how difference is manifested through geographical location; economic differentiation and identification through social class; embodied differences such as gender and disability; and through a developmental lens, which demarcates activities as congruent within a particular developmental age or as transgressive. It discusses these instances in ways that attend to the local, contingent and partial knowledges about contexts of development and movements through time. The introduction chapter then presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book

Conclusion: theorising transgressive developmental trajectories and understanding children seen as ‘different’

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book discusses the three interrelated themes to explore how they offer possibilities with which to refine and extend knowledge about non/normative development and 'different' childhoods. It has been structured around three core themes that speak to critiques of developmental psychology. The book discloses several issues that are relevant to understanding and developing theory about non-normative or different childhoods. It discusses geographical location as it intersects with understandings of nation, childhood and gender for child migrants in a host country; gender and role models within families and other care settings; the location of the child as a vulnerable subject; and development as located within particular understandings of mothers' work, food and social class. The book highlights that the construction of a child was in relation to the duties of adults to provide for and protect children and to ensure that they develop appropriately

Waiting for Discovery and Support? Neurodivergent Subjectivities in the Swedish Educational Landscape

PURPOSE: In this paper, we explore and contrast the Swedish state and NGO arguments for initiating two changes in national educational degree objectives in Swedish teacher education: one regarding sex and cohabitation education, and the other regarding support for pupils with ʻneuropsychiatric difficultiesʼ such as autism and ADHD (here referred to as neurodivergent pupils). APPROACH: Using critical policy analysis, we compare the arguments from the government as well as responding bodies for introducing the two objectives, with a focus on neurodivergent pupils. RESULTS: Our findings suggest that discourses concerning sex and cohabitation education for all pupils and support for pupils with ʻneuropsychiatric difficultiesʼ respectively derive from different educational ideologies and reproduce different ideas about pupils as active citizens versus passive objects of interventions. The objective of sex and cohabitation education is framed within a norm critical discourse putting forward reflexivity and identity, and where pupils are active subjects to be involved in the process. In contrast, neurodivergence is framed within a deficit approach as neurobiological, individual impairment, and a special educational problem that should be managed by professionals. It is seen as a risk for school failure, where neurodivergent pupils are passive objects of professional discovery and support. CONCLUSION: In a Swedish educational policy landscape, stressing the importance of educating pupils in line with ideas of children as right-bearers, our exploration illustrates how ʻall pupilsʼ versus neurodivergent pupils, within teacher education, are positioned as belonging to different categories of citizens: as active subjects of rights, versus passive subjects of care. This perception of neurodivergence, we argue, hampers progress towards embracing neurodivergence as a social category, and neurodivergent pupils as political subjects

Critical autism studies: exploring epistemic dialogues and intersections, challenging dominant understandings of autism

In this paper we explore how our cultural contexts give rise to different kinds of knowledges of autism and examine how they are articulated, gain currency, and form the basis for policy, practice and political movements. We outline key tensions for the development of critical autism studies as an international, critical abilities approach. Our aim is not to offer a cross-cultural account of autism or to assume a coherence or universality of ‘autism’ as a singular diagnostic category/reality. Rather, we map the ways in which what is experienced and understood as autism, plays out in different cultural contexts, drawing on the notion of ‘epistemic communities’ to explore shifts in knowledge about autism, including concepts such as ‘neurodiversity’, and how these travel through cultural spaces. The paper explores two key epistemic tensions; the dominance of ‘neuro culture’ and dominant constructions of personhood and what it means to be human

Waiting for discovery and support?:Divergent subjectivities in the Swedish education landscape

PURPOSE: In this paper, we explore and contrast the Swedish state and NGO arguments for installing two changes in national educational degree objectives in Swedish teacher education: one regarding sex and cohabitation education, and the other regarding support for pupils with ʻneuropsychiatric difficultiesʼ (here referred to as neurodivergent pupils, such as autistic or ADHD pupils). APPROACH: Using critical policy analysis, we compare the arguments from the government as well as responding bodies for instating the two objectives, with a focus on neurodivergent pupils.RESULTS: Our findings suggest that discourses concerning sex and cohabitation education for all pupils and support for pupils with ʻneuropsychiatric difficultiesʼ respectively, derive from different educational ideologies and reproduce different ideas about pupils; as active citizens versus passive objects of interventions. The objective of sex and cohabitation education is framed within a norm critical discourse putting forward reflexivity and identity, and where pupils are active subjects to be involved in the process. In contrast, neurodivergence is framed within a deficit approach as neurobiological, individual impairment, and a special educational problem that should be managed by professionals. It is seen as a risk for school failure, where neurodivergent pupils are passive objects of professional discovery and support.CONCLUSION: In a Swedish educational policy landscape, stressing the importance of educating pupils in line with ideas of children as right-bearers, our exploration illustrates how ʻall pupilsʼ versus neurodivergent pupils, already in teacher education, are positioned as belonging to different categories of citizens; as active subjects of rights, versus passive subjects of care. This perception of neurodivergence, we argue, hampers progress towards embracing neurodivergence as social category, and neurodivergent pupils as political subjects.<br/

Cutting our own keys: New possibilities of neurodivergent storying in research

Increasingly, neurodivergent people are sharing their own narratives and conducting their own research. Prominent individuals have integrated the ‘nothing about us without us’ slogan, used by neurodivergent and other disabled social activists, into academia. This article imagines a neuromixed academia. We consider how to work through challenges present in neuromixed encounters; to support cross-neurotype communication and pave the way for an ethos of community and collaboration. We explore how we might create a space in which neurodivergent experiences are seen as just one part of our complex and multifaceted identities. We do this through the process of ‘cutting our own keys’, to try out new possibilities of neurodivergent storying aimed at finding ourselves in our own stories about neurodivergence. This involves borrowing and developing methodological approaches formulated outside of research on different forms of neurodivergence, and to invent our own concepts based on our own embodied experiences and the social worlds we inhabit. Throughout, we mingle our own autoethnographic accounts in relation to research accounts and theories, as a way of illustrating the work with the text as a thinking about neurodivergence with each other in itself

Being, Knowing, and Doing: Importing Theoretical Toolboxes for Autism Studies

The aim of this article was to think with and elaborate on theories developed outside of autism research and the autistic community, and through this support the production of new autistic-led theories: theories and concepts based on autistic people's own embodied experiences and the social worlds we inhabit. The article consists of three different sections all of part of the overall umbrella, Being, knowing, and doing: Importing theoretical toolboxes for autism studies. In each section, we import useful concepts from elsewhere and tailor them to autism studies. Throughout, we mingle our own autoethnographic accounts and shared discourse in relation to research accounts and theories. Illustrating being, we explore and discuss the possibilities of critical realism in autism studies. Illustrating knowing, we explore and discuss the possibilities of standpoint theory in autism studies. Finally, illustrating doing, we explore and discuss the possibilities of neurocosmopolitics including epistemic (in)justice in autism studies. Our proposal here is for an epistemic shift toward neurodiverse collaboration. We are inviting nonautistic people to work with, not on, us, aiming at to make autism research more ethical, breaking down bureaucratic structures, and questioning poor theory and shoddy methodology. Acknowledging intersecting axes of oppression in which an individual seeks to renegotiate and reimagine what it means to belong also means to understand what needs changing in society, as it is and how we might do things differently.Output Status: Forthcoming/Available Onlin

Neurodiverse spaces: exploring the potential for social networking to reconstruct our ideas of 'friendship'

As critical researchers engaged in work that celebrates neurodiversity we are interested in ways in which particular spaces can be experienced as AS/NT friendly. Given the strong focus on 'impairments' associated with autism in many of the dominant literatures, particularly the 'impairment in social interaction', alternative understandings of friendship and social interactions are important if we are to engage with neurodiverse relationships. In this poster we explore representations of friendship among autistic people and the potential impact that social networking in online-space such as Facebook or off-line space such camps for autistic people may have in enabling a reconstruction of ideas about friendship and how these alternative notions of 'friendship' may be useful for some autistic people. The growing body of literature focusing on the internet as a potential tool for empowerment for use by people with AS, means that it is important to explore its potential for creating neurodiverse spaces that recognise and respect difference. In this presentation we draw on the example of Facebook and Swedish summer camps for adults with autism to explore the potential for social networking to support neurodiverse communities

Becoming an autistic adult: exploring the transitions of young people with autism from education/care to working life

The focus of the paper is to draw on an understanding of autism as neurodiversity to document the experiences of young people with autism, their parents/carers and families and professionals involved in the processes of transitions to young adulthood. We focus on transition into worklife. We illustrate our ideas with data from our previous and ongoing research on neurodiverse spaces for children and adults with autism. A key way in which people with autism are getting their voices heard is through new technologies, particularly via the Internet and an increasing number of people with autism are using the Internet as a forum for self-advocacy (see for example Dekker 2000; Ward & Meyer 1999). The implications for refocusing an examination on transitions into work by people with autism through a lens of neurodiversity are far reaching in terms of how people with autism fashion their own positive identities and how service providers negotiate opportunities for some, and how workplaces shift in terms of accommodating difference. We argue that there is a need for inclusive and diverse workspaces, where the strengths of some adults with autism can be integrated into a shared neurodiverse and neurotypical space