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In this interlude, Tougaw examines two major cultural responses to advances in neuroscience: neurodiversity politics and the U.S.-European race to “map” the brain in the hope of creating a dynamic digital “brain atlas.” While neurodiversity activists emphasize the difference from one human brain to another, the brain atlas projects aim to create a composite of the human brain. The interlude examines the inevitable contradictions that arise from both points of view, arguing that both are valuable but that neurodiversity politics and scientific efforts to map the composite brain would benefit from more mutual dialogue.

In this chapter, Tougaw examines multiple autobiographies by three autistic writers: Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, Naoki Higashida, and John Elder Robison. Like other brain memoirists, these authors write to craft agency in response to the accidents of physiology and culture that shape their identities. But they also write more explicitly as rhetoricians, makers of emergent and rapidly evolving autistic culture and neurodiversity politics. The marketing of their books, as with most autistic autobiographers, tends to focus on the power of the writing to take readers “inside” autistic minds or worlds. In their writing, though, they emphasize writing as the power to challenge stereotypes about autism, assert their authority, and shape cultural debate.

This chapter chronicles a summer of clinical ethnography at a camp for youth with Asperger’s syndrome and related autism spectrum conditions, run by a close-knit community of live-action role-playing (LARP) gamers aiming to be inclusive of neurodiversity. Within this alternative culture with its alternative norms, the neurodevelopmental differences associated with Asperger’s took on new and valued meanings and manifestations. The chapter reviews predominant theories about cognition in autism (theory of mind, executive function, and weak central coherence), depicting these attributes not as individual deficits but as collaborative engagements with the physical, cultural, and symbolic materials of the surrounding world. Autism, the chapter proposes, is characterized by a heightened reliance on external systems of organization to create a sense of experiential coherence and to fend off existential threats of meaninglessness and chaos. LARP games offer one such system of organization through their framework of stable, shared narratives, and genre conventions. These resources support interpersonal coordination, bringing together people who share relevant cognitive characteristics into a tenuous but deeply valued community.

Michael Orsini and Joyce Davidson The work brings together a range of perspectives by uniting researchers who are concerned, to a greater or lesser degree, with autistic subjectivities and the politics of cognitive difference. International, trans-disciplinary approach brings philosophers and critical theorists into dialogue with researchers who have conducted case studies of autism within the social sciences and humanities; Situates autism within an abilities framework that respects the complex personhood of autistic individuals, in contrast to the deficit model prevalent in much existing clinical literature; Suitable for scholars, policymakers, autistic individuals, and other individuals and groups involved in developing strategies and services with, and for, autistic people.

Patrick McDonagh The notion of empathy, like that of intelligence, seems to require outsiders – like those with autism – whose exclusion from “empathic consciousness” can assure the rest of us that we are acceptably empathic. This chapter challenges the use of autism as a test case for validating the concept of empathy.

Stuart Murray Drawing on theory, clinical conceptions, ideas of possible medical futures, and writings from those with autism themselves, this chapter aims to think through the multiple and often confusing arguments that come with the juxtaposition of the terms autism and the posthuman.

Francisco Ortega This chapter analyzes the relationship between autistic people and their brains. In particular, it explores how a brain-related vocabulary was mobilized by autistic self-advocates to deconstruct deficit-focused narratives of autism. At the same time, it challenges the idea that neuroscience is radically transforming notions of personhood and community.

Charlotte Brownlow and Lindsay O’Dell The neurodiversity movement claims autism as a difference (and often as a superior identity). This chapter considers how a biological explanation of autism has been refashioned into a neurological account of neurodiversity, which can help people with autism to engage with negative and disabling mainstream models of autism.

Maja Holmer Nadesan This chapter considers the politics behind competing explanations for autism. Critiquing the dominant frame governing autism research and public funding for autism, the author argues that genetic research trajectories and practices have the potential to reduce autistic persons to a form of “bare life” denied social equality and political representations.

Kristin Bumiller The life chances of people with disabilities, and in particular those with autism, are highly determined by state policies. This chapter offers a critical perspective on how the treatment of children with disabilities and the proscriptions for future policies are directly connected to the changing nature of state responsibility.

Dora Raymaker and Christina Nicolaidis This chapter surveys key issues in minority-scientist social dynamics and how they shape traditional autism research. Drawing examples from a project with autistic adults, the chapter examines how community based participatory research challenges traditional approaches to research, providing a historically effective route to social change for minority communities.

Sara Ryan Analyzing data from two qualitative research projects in which people with autism spectrum disorder were asked to talk about their experiences, this chapter considers the ambiguity surrounding diagnosis and considers what an “official” diagnosis means in terms of the development of a reflexive autistic self.

Chapter 3 charts the scientific and social histories of investigating autism as genetic (one gene/one autism) and shifts to genomics (many genes/many autisms). It traces the initial optimism and subsequent failure to find a major gene for autism, and technological convergence of “autisms” with multiple diseases at the molecular level.

Dana Lee Baker and Lila Walsh This chapter examines the degree to which the needs and interests of so-called low- and high-functioning individuals with autism are set in tension with one another in Canadian political discourse. The authors consider autism within disability policy before moving on to discuss the historical development of autism as a public concern.

Brigitte Chamak and Beatrice Bonniau This chapter provides a comparative perspective on autism advocacy using insights gleaned from the study of health social movements. By refocusing attention on contested perspectives of community organization, the chapter sheds light on how people with autism (and non-autistic others) organize themselves and others for diverse political ends.

Mark Osteen This chapter considers “the narrative problem of autism,” suggesting that autism stories tend to follow general rules that threaten to collapse autism’s diversity into a menu of formulae. By contrast, the author suggests that visual media may offer a more adequate means to narrate autism.