Crafting Autistic Futures

Much autism research conceptualizes the only possible good future as being through the early detection, intervention, and eventual cure of autism. In this future, autism, and therefore, autistic people, no longer exist. Such violence frames autistic lives as undesirable, and even impossible. This dissertation draws on life course ethnography, disability anthropology and critical autism studies, and multimodal anthropology and craft studies in conversation with the U.S. autistic self-advocacy movement to craft viable autistic futures. In taking up the question of autistic—and therefore human—futures, this dissertation’s entry point is what some autistic self-advocates call “special interests.” This emic term describes interests and passions that are seen as more intense than other interests (what might be termed “hobbies”) and distinct from how non-autistic people experience their interests. Yet, like other aspects of autistic life, special interests are pathologized and reduced to diagnostic symptoms. Instead, these interests are a site of autistic meaning-making that show how autistic people navigate their life course in an ableist world. An autistic anthropologist, the author used their own special interest of knitting as a conceptual and methodological entry point that attuned ethnographic techniques to autistic ways of knowing and being. By showing how autistic lives and communities are variously crafted, this dissertation advances scholarly understandings of autistic adulthood and draws attention to overlooked experiences, particularly those of autistic joy. Illuminating autistic joy creates more accurate and equitable understandings of autistic adulthood, refuting the ableist assumption that being autistic and living a good life are fundamentally opposed to each other. Crafting extends anthropological understandings of neurodiversity, the life course, and what a “good life” looks like for autistic people. This research reframes neurodiversity as not simply an object of study or identity-based framework but as an epistemological opportunity for reshaping what and whose knowledge is taken as meaningful.