Transnational Autistic Identities

The historic lack of diversity in autism scholarship has affected the way we teach and learn about autistic identities and knowledge across disciplines and spaces.  As more autistic authors fight for visibility and representation in social and academic platforms, there remains a dearth of scholarship regarding postcolonial and/or transnational autistic experiences.  This is despite the rich discourse prevalent in online communities accessed by autistic users around the world.  This paper explores the use of digital discourse analysis to disrupt the academic ghost authorship of autism, which often erases (or evades) intersecting issues of race, language, and nationality in the negotiation of autistic knowledge and identities.  Scholars who study or collaborate with online communities can investigate the ways this knowledge is constructed across cultural and political borders, thereby holding space for underrepresented autistic perspectives

Who is Worthy of Rights?:An analysis of children living at the intersections of disability, citizenship and migration in the United States and Italy

Efforts towards disability rights have largely failed to address the experiences of those living at the intersection of disability, citizenship, and migration. The authors draw upon multiple qualitative case studies carried out in Italy and in the US and interpreted through the social model of disability and the Disability Critical Race Theory in Education framework, to explore this intersection. They consider the extent to which national jurisdictions distribute children’s disability rights according to citizenship and migratory status. Findings from Italy and the US highlight that disabled migrant children experience barriers to quality multilingual inclusive education and access to relevant services