Learning from Disability Communities: Universal Design, the #Actually Autistic community, and Autistic Women's Lives

Research studies about autistic experiences of schooling often undervalue or completely exclude the perspectives of autistic women (Cook & Garnett, 2018). Additionally, research that focuses on the lived experiences of autistics often employ methodological tools that exclude non-speaking people or people who prefer to communicate in other ways (Biklen, 2005). In this session I will share a work in progress of my dissertation data that explores the stories of autistic women’s school lives. As a Disability Studies researcher I will highlight some of my multimodal methodological successes and failures as I learn the schooling stories of these women.

Using Figured Worlds (Holland et al, 1998), Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991), and the notion that publicness is mediated through Twitter (Baym & boyd, 2012), I investigated how membership is marked into the #ActuallyAutistic community, who takes up the hashtag, how membership is shaped, and how it is used. #ActuallyAutistic is situated within discourse of what is “normal” for autistics, as perpetuated by both non-autistic and autistic users with different proximities to the community. Content by the #ActuallyAutistic community is shaped by ideologies that exist within, outside of, and cut across digital and non-digital spaces.