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Paper short abstract

This paper discusses what happens when ethnographies of autism become autistic ethnographies. Centering varying autistic needs in a study of London’s urban sensescapes, it explores how an autistic anthropologist works with autistic interlocutors in understanding how autistic people inhabit the city.

Paper long abstract

There is no one way of sensing the urban, just as there is no one way to be autistic. Still, navigating the city has unique challenges for those who embody other ways of sensing and perceiving the urban environment.

My upcoming doctoral research turns its attention to autistic experiences as everyday relations between the autistic person and the sensory environment beyond diagnostic labels and emplaces these sensory experiences within the context of urban spaces in London, UK. That is, it explores how the sensory organisations of the urban environment, which are themselves socially, historically and geographically contingent, interact with autistic experiences of the everyday.

This paper focuses on the methodological considerations that emerge out of such an inquiry. In mapping out the entanglements of the autistic, the sensory and the urban, there emerges a need to consider how the methods interact with the politics and ethics of fieldwork. I argue that this can be explored through crip/neuroqueer ethnographic experimentations which bridging the gap between ethnographic and autistic ways of knowing. This allows not only for empowerment of autistic narratives in anthropological knowledge-making (for autistic interlocutors as well as autistic anthropologists), but also for an exploration of the possibilities of an autistic ‘right to the city’.