As a cultural medical anthropologist who works on disability broadly and on deafness specifically, I read Jaswal & Akhtar's (J&A's) essay with great interest. They are to be commended for asking important questions about the assumptions that researchers make about autistic individuals’ behaviors and the motivations behind them. Their argument about the importance of analyzing autistic individuals’ actions as interactional and embedded within enabling or disabling social worlds is spot on. More than this, their attempts to scramble the script by arguing that we need to look at non-autistic peoples’ behaviors and motivations is a welcome intervention in a field that has been heavily focused on autistic peoples’ negative or deficient behavior. In this commentary, I focus on three points: the need to consider semiotic ideologies of both researchers and autistic people, questions of commensurability, and problems with “the social” as a concept. I end with a call for new research methodologies that are not deficit-based and that consider a broad range of linguistic and non-linguistic communicative practices.
While J&A do not explicitly note this, it seems to me that they are advocating that researchers consider their own semiotic ideologies and how these are applied to their research subjects. According to Keane (Reference Keane2018, p. 65), semiotic ideologies “refers to people's underlying assumptions about what signs are, what functions signs do or do not serve, and what consequences they might or might not produce.” Keane (Reference Keane2018, p. 66) also points out that semiotic ideologies often “determine what may or may not count as evidence of a subject's intentions.” (And here I might point out that the title of the target article, “Being versus Appearing,” might set up a false analytical black hole. Or perhaps this was intentional?) Researchers must thus explicitly consider what signs and actions they label as communication and how this communication maps onto intention and vice versa; J&A point out the work of presumptions/assumptions throughout their article. Rutherford (Reference Rutherford2009, next to last paragraph), in a discussion of her non-verbal daughter's work with speech therapists, notes that these therapists bring their own beliefs about language and communication to the table. As she notes, “Millie's therapy also foregrounds dimensions of sign use that receive short shrift in this ideology: the fact that others give us our words, the fact that reference is just a small part of sign use, the fact that we can only know what we ‘meant’ after the fact. Millie's work with her therapists vividly reveals the multifarious practices of belief entailed in our interactions with one another.” What do researchers working on and with autistic people believe, and how does this influence their research?
More than this, Keane (Reference Keane2018, p. 66) notes that “differences among semiotic ideologies can also be so striking that they suggest quite dramatic contrasts between possible world views.” I want to ask a quick question about the stakes of J&A's research, given that they are working to render autistic people commensurable to non-autistic people. This is evident in their careful arguments, drawing from diverse cultural practices for example, about the ways that autistic and non-autistic people are actually quite similar. However, what if (some) autistic people were actually quite different from non-autistic people in their world views and in their ontologies? While I do not wish to make this argument here, and while J&A have curated an appendix that clearly foregrounds commensurability, I do want to consider how we might approach difference in a way that does not devalue it or label it as a deficit.
Along these same lines, I wish to push us to think differently about the concept of “the social”; if autism is considered a “social disorder,” it seems to me that we need to know what social is and is not. What does “social” in the concept of social motivation mean, for example? While disability studies scholars have argued for a social model of disability in which disability is created through a disabling interaction between an individual's impairment and society (e.g., Shakespeare Reference Shakespeare and Davis2002); theorists have argued that we are now post-social or that we are seeing the death of the social in this current period of late capitalist modernity (e.g., Donzelot Reference Donzelot1984; Rose Reference Rose1996). Similarly, how do we carve out a space for valuing asociality as some disability studies scholars (e.g., Price Reference Price2011) have advocated for? A focus on asociality can be seen as a critique of the ways in which “the social” is normative and coercive and does not allow for diverse ways of being in the world. Might researchers of autism work to stretch the social to include practices that might not be considered typically or normatively social? Autistic practices thus challenge us to expand our conceptualization of sociality (Ochs & Solomon Reference Ochs and Solomon2010; also see McKearney & Zoanni Reference McKearney and Zoanni2018).
How might researchers work to orient toward autistic individuals and ethically engage with them in ways that both maximize their agency and recognize that asociality, or perhaps untypical sociality, is a mode of engagement with others? Of course, there are multiple forms of autistic socialities (Ochs & Solomon Reference Ochs and Solomon2010). Along with J&A, I argue that researchers would do well to look at autistic people and practices not only through a lens of deficit and lack; as J&A discuss, thinking about autism in relation to other categories of cultural and medical difference, such as deaf people who use sign languages, might prove to be productive. What are autistic peoples’ own semiotic ideologies? Autistic scholars and activists have long demonstrated that autistic people are knowledge producers in their own right. Refusing to engage with these individuals’ words and actions – on their own terms – is ethically problematic, and as J&A have pointed out, in some cases it can result in puzzling and paradoxical findings.
As a cultural medical anthropologist who works on disability broadly and on deafness specifically, I read Jaswal & Akhtar's (J&A's) essay with great interest. They are to be commended for asking important questions about the assumptions that researchers make about autistic individuals’ behaviors and the motivations behind them. Their argument about the importance of analyzing autistic individuals’ actions as interactional and embedded within enabling or disabling social worlds is spot on. More than this, their attempts to scramble the script by arguing that we need to look at non-autistic peoples’ behaviors and motivations is a welcome intervention in a field that has been heavily focused on autistic peoples’ negative or deficient behavior. In this commentary, I focus on three points: the need to consider semiotic ideologies of both researchers and autistic people, questions of commensurability, and problems with “the social” as a concept. I end with a call for new research methodologies that are not deficit-based and that consider a broad range of linguistic and non-linguistic communicative practices.
While J&A do not explicitly note this, it seems to me that they are advocating that researchers consider their own semiotic ideologies and how these are applied to their research subjects. According to Keane (Reference Keane2018, p. 65), semiotic ideologies “refers to people's underlying assumptions about what signs are, what functions signs do or do not serve, and what consequences they might or might not produce.” Keane (Reference Keane2018, p. 66) also points out that semiotic ideologies often “determine what may or may not count as evidence of a subject's intentions.” (And here I might point out that the title of the target article, “Being versus Appearing,” might set up a false analytical black hole. Or perhaps this was intentional?) Researchers must thus explicitly consider what signs and actions they label as communication and how this communication maps onto intention and vice versa; J&A point out the work of presumptions/assumptions throughout their article. Rutherford (Reference Rutherford2009, next to last paragraph), in a discussion of her non-verbal daughter's work with speech therapists, notes that these therapists bring their own beliefs about language and communication to the table. As she notes, “Millie's therapy also foregrounds dimensions of sign use that receive short shrift in this ideology: the fact that others give us our words, the fact that reference is just a small part of sign use, the fact that we can only know what we ‘meant’ after the fact. Millie's work with her therapists vividly reveals the multifarious practices of belief entailed in our interactions with one another.” What do researchers working on and with autistic people believe, and how does this influence their research?
More than this, Keane (Reference Keane2018, p. 66) notes that “differences among semiotic ideologies can also be so striking that they suggest quite dramatic contrasts between possible world views.” I want to ask a quick question about the stakes of J&A's research, given that they are working to render autistic people commensurable to non-autistic people. This is evident in their careful arguments, drawing from diverse cultural practices for example, about the ways that autistic and non-autistic people are actually quite similar. However, what if (some) autistic people were actually quite different from non-autistic people in their world views and in their ontologies? While I do not wish to make this argument here, and while J&A have curated an appendix that clearly foregrounds commensurability, I do want to consider how we might approach difference in a way that does not devalue it or label it as a deficit.
Along these same lines, I wish to push us to think differently about the concept of “the social”; if autism is considered a “social disorder,” it seems to me that we need to know what social is and is not. What does “social” in the concept of social motivation mean, for example? While disability studies scholars have argued for a social model of disability in which disability is created through a disabling interaction between an individual's impairment and society (e.g., Shakespeare Reference Shakespeare and Davis2002); theorists have argued that we are now post-social or that we are seeing the death of the social in this current period of late capitalist modernity (e.g., Donzelot Reference Donzelot1984; Rose Reference Rose1996). Similarly, how do we carve out a space for valuing asociality as some disability studies scholars (e.g., Price Reference Price2011) have advocated for? A focus on asociality can be seen as a critique of the ways in which “the social” is normative and coercive and does not allow for diverse ways of being in the world. Might researchers of autism work to stretch the social to include practices that might not be considered typically or normatively social? Autistic practices thus challenge us to expand our conceptualization of sociality (Ochs & Solomon Reference Ochs and Solomon2010; also see McKearney & Zoanni Reference McKearney and Zoanni2018).
How might researchers work to orient toward autistic individuals and ethically engage with them in ways that both maximize their agency and recognize that asociality, or perhaps untypical sociality, is a mode of engagement with others? Of course, there are multiple forms of autistic socialities (Ochs & Solomon Reference Ochs and Solomon2010). Along with J&A, I argue that researchers would do well to look at autistic people and practices not only through a lens of deficit and lack; as J&A discuss, thinking about autism in relation to other categories of cultural and medical difference, such as deaf people who use sign languages, might prove to be productive. What are autistic peoples’ own semiotic ideologies? Autistic scholars and activists have long demonstrated that autistic people are knowledge producers in their own right. Refusing to engage with these individuals’ words and actions – on their own terms – is ethically problematic, and as J&A have pointed out, in some cases it can result in puzzling and paradoxical findings.