Finding Cause: Autism, Anticipation, and the Embodied Politics of Risk

• In Event: 262 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 04.

Abstract

This paper draws on a grounded theory analysis of twenty interviews conducted with mothers of children diagnosed with autism. Synthesizing this data with literature in the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology, I attend to the multiple ways that mothers make sense of autism risk. This paper develops the concept of “finding cause” to describe how mothers make sense of autism as the outcome of vague and particular, complex and interacting, factors. These factors are manifest in their own past experiences, the bodies and behaviors of their children and other family members, and in the futures they imagine for their children and themselves. Drawing on work on “anticipation,” I discuss how these collective and interacting resources orient mothers’ actions in multiple temporal directions as they prepare to and then have a child following the diagnosis of a son or daughter with autism. My analysis explicitly considers how bodies, symptoms, and interventions become central in women’s understandings of autism’s causes, bringing embodied knowledge to the forefront of their experiences of autism risk. This paper contributes new insights on how scientific information and categories of risk are made meaningful to mothers of children with autism based on the relationships between both biological and social experiences.

Author

• Martine Danielle Lappe, Columbia University