We’re all strangers here

Gemma Williams

doi:10.1111/anhu.12270

We’re all strangers here

Gemma Williams

School of Humanities and Social Science

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

This piece forms part of my linguistic ethnographic doctoral thesis, investigating the ways in which mutual understanding does and does not break down between autistic and non-autistic people. As an autistic researcher researching autistic language use, it became increasingly apparent throughout my research that I could not separate myself and my ”insider perspective” from my work. Autoethnographic creative writing offers a way to reflect on my inter-relation with the subject matter as well as ”giving voice” to those [autistic people more generally] who are often overlooked. Autism is heterogeneous in its nature and autistic people are diverse in ways that popular conventions and stereotypes don’t often afford. In this piece I represent three very different characters—each autistic—to give some insight into the breadth of what ”autistic-ness” can be. The first character is based on myself, exploring the tensions found in being an autist within the academy. The two fictionalized characters are composites of my research participants, based on my ethnographic observations.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	123-129
Number of pages	7
Journal	Anthropology and Humanism
Volume	45
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12270
Publication status	Published - 10 Jul 2020
Event	American Anthropological Association annual conference: Society of Humanistic Anthropology award ceremony invited speaker - Vancouver, Canada Duration: 21 Nov 2019 → 25 Nov 2019 https://www.americananthro.org/AttendEvents/landing.aspx?ItemNumber=14722&navItemNumber=566

Bibliographical note

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Keywords

Autoethnography
AAA
Society for Humanistic Anthropology Creative Non-fiction prize
autism
loneliness
autoethnography
ethnographic fiction
empirical pragmatics

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10.1111/anhu.12270Licence: CC BY-NC-ND

We’re All Strangers HereFinal published version, 51.4 KBLicence: CC BY-NC-ND

Cite this

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title = "We{\textquoteright}re all strangers here",

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We’re all strangers here

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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