Description

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This book considers the many ways autistic lives have been dominantly storied historically, politically, socially, and culturally. Using a range of transdisciplinary theory, the author develops a theoretically rich approach termed 'dis/orientation', which breaks new ground for autism research's understanding of everyday life, and everyday childhoods. The book uses stories of everyday life to provoke new analyses of what it means to talk about, live with, and become, an autistic child: these stories of schooling and education highlight what is done to autistic bodies, what is done by these bodies, and what becomes between them. This offers a way in to the theoretical work of dis/orientation; a practice and an ethic, that means remaining ever watchful for single orientations towards (and away from) autism and childhood, and the children living those childhoods. This leads to new disciplinary grounds, a reconceptualisation of the terrains of research and practice, not of the disordered and disembodied autistic mind, but of the embodied, lived, and everyday.

About the Author

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Jill Pluquailec is Senior Lecturer in Autism at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Her research involves work with disabled children and their families. Her work sits within social justice, the social, cultural and political constructions of autism, and the development of more diverse ways we can move towards honouring difference in all aspects of life. Although situated within Education, much of her work is transdisciplinary drawing heavily on Sociology and Critical Disability Studies.