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Paper short abstract

This paper discusses what happens when ethnographies of autism become autistic ethnographies. Centering autistemologies (autistic epistemologies) in a study of London’s urban sensescapes, it problematises ethnographic methods as autistic engagement and facilitating an autistic ‘right to 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. Among these other urban embodiments, ‘autism’ represents a variety of experiences gathered under a diagnostic label which emerged out of modern, western psychiatric endeavours. These endeavours subsequently constructed ‘autistic’ as a particular kind of bodymind, one that is socially, sensorily, and behaviorally distinct from non-autistic ways of being.

My upcoming doctoral research turns its attention to autistic experiences as lived realities beyond diagnostic labels and emplaces these sensory experiences within the context of urban sensescapes in London, UK. That is, it explores how the sensory organisations of the urban, which are themselves socially, historically and geographically contingent, interact with the concept of an ‘autistic’ kind of sensory experience.

This paper focuses on the methodological (which are simultaneously ethical) 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 empower autistic narratives of urban space. I argue that this can be explored through a neuroqueering of ethnographic processes of data collection as participant-led initiatives. Bridging the gap between ethnographic and autistic ways of knowing allows not only for empowerment of autistic narratives in anthropological knowledge-making, but also for an exploration of the possibilities of an autistic ‘right to the city’.