ANT442H1

Social Studies of Autism

Autism is simultaneously celebrated by autists as a core identity and pathologized in public and clinical discourses as a disease to be cured. This course spans anthropology of autism and critical autism studies, examining autism as both lived experience and rubric for a complex set of biosocial and cultural phenomena. Engaging with academic and popular texts and multi-media sources, we explore how knowledge of autism is socially produced in historical, political and cultural contexts; autobiographies and ethnographies of autistic lives; histories of autistic organising; and autism and intersectionality, attending particularly to race and gender.