Sensibility and Experience in Autism: Prostheses, Interaction, and Life Histories

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, public awareness of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has grown alongside increasing rates of diagnosis. Work by social scientists has demonstrated how various social and professional groups employ different epistemologies and ontologies of ASD when they explain the causes, treatments, identities, and social consequences of this condition. Epistemologies of ASD are located in practices of knowledge making from genetics and neuroscience to diagnostic tools and treatments. Our understanding of autism also comprises alternative ways of knowing that have often been excluded from dominant accounts of autism, including the concept of neurodiversity and other sensibilities that comprise local forms of knowledge. This open panel aims to bring together STS scholars investigating different epistemologies or ontologies of ASD, to identify and articulate how STS has grasped and responded to this growing social phenomenon, and to address the limits of our analyses thus far. We seek papers exploring the tensions between dominant frameworks of ASD and sensibilities that are less known, imagined, or considered in current STS accounts. These sensibilities could include but are not limited to: implicated actors in autism whose voices are often left out or only discursively present across situations; gendered dimensions of autism diagnosis, treatment, or care; global and/or cross-cultural perspectives; relationships between human and nonhuman animals in autism science; and others. The panel will explore the sensibilities at play in perceptions and experiences of autism and aim to inspire new directions in STS research on autism and related categories of disability and difference.

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chair

• Chloe Silverman, Drexel University

Individual Presentations

• Growth in Context: The Emergence of a Disability Frame in Accounts of the Development of Adults with Autism - Benjamin DiCicco-Bloom, Hamilton College

• Reflections on What Moves Us - Melissa Park, McGill University

• Permeable Narratives, Permeable Selves: Mutant Roleplay and the Autism Spectrum - Elizabeth Fein, Duquesne University

• Who Let the Dogs In? The (In)Sensibilities of Autism Epistemologies in Light of Human-Canine Interaction - Olga Solomon, University of Southern California