Description
This paper explores the use of creative autoethnographic writing as a vehicle for amplifying the often marginalised autistic voice within academia. Drawing on autoethnographic methods, my recently completed doctoral thesis investigated the cognitive basis of the breakdowns in mutual understanding that can often occur between autistic and non-autistic people. In the first instance, this talk briefly describes some of the findings from the small-scale community engagement project (‘Talking Together’), that saw the core autistic participants come together in pairs with familiar and unfamiliar, autistic and non-autistic conversation partners to talk about loneliness.Following this, the talk turns to the role that creative methods – in this case creative autoethnographic writing – can have in making research emancipatory. It explores how the performance of the ‘vulnerable self’ can help to avoid the ‘fish-bowling’ effect of being ‘a “subject” for others to ponder over’ (Moon in Milton and Moon, 2012: 36), and how evocative creative writing can lead the way towards transgressivity and to making the unheard, heard.
| Period | 20 May 2021 |
|---|---|
| Degree of Recognition | National |