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Paper short abstract:

Despite diagnostic criteria of autistic people as lacking emotional capacity, many autistic people have topics that they care deeply about. Such passionate interests are visualized through an ethnographic knitting project to reveal modes of caring and collective futures outside of curative violence.

Paper long abstract:

Dominant models of autism advocacy in the contemporary US present autism as a topic of care and concern in need of early detection, intervention, and eventual cure. This trajectory of care works toward a future where autism, and by extension, autistic people, no longer exist. In the context of such pervasive ableist violence, considering autistic futures is crucial. Taking anthropology as a project of making more possible futures, this project examines autistic adults’ interests to explore how autistic people create meaning around things that matter to them. Examining what autistic people care about illuminates pathways through the life course that challenge neuronormative futurities.

By using the autistic ethnographer’s interest of knitting, this project presents visual methods that are grounded in autistic ways of knowing and doing. Knitting is offered as a form of image-making and ethnographic method that expresses a caring with interlocutors, while encouraging viewers to care about neurodivergence and ableism. Knitting materializes autistic experiences that highlight joy, sociality, and wellbeing that exceed diagnostic knowledges of what it means to be autistic. This suggests that we should care about autism, but not necessarily in the ways that one might think. New modes of caring can make autistic lives and futures more possible.