Des Fitzgerald writes of his book, Tracing Autism, “This is a book about scientists talking about their own practice, in tones that are beset by ambiguity, uncertainty, complexity, and even some anxiety” (9). This is true, and after reading the book one might find the description a little understated. By now the idea that neuroscience, any science, is …
Introduction
In the early years of the 21st century, Ian Hacking wrote a series of essays on the theme of autistic subjectivity. These eclectic, occasional essays were, he later told Andrew Lakoff, a final phase of his decades-long “making up people” project. As with other phases of this research, which dated back to the 1980s, and which included works …
Last September, a group of scholars gathered at the State University of Rio de Janeiro for “Autism Spectrum Disorders in Global, Local and Personal Perspective: A Cross-Cultural Workshop”. The event was organized by Clarice Rios, a postdoctoral fellow at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, and Elizabeth Fein, a professor of psychology at Duquesne University, and funded by the …
On Immunity: An Inoculation
By Eula Biss
Graywolf Press, 2014, 205 pp.
The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era
By Lennard J. Davis
University of Michigan Press, 2013, 155 pp.
Autism and Gender: From Refrigerator Mothers to Computer Geeks
By Jordynn Jack
University of Illinois Press, 2014, 306 pp.
Disability themes have become an increasingly central figure …
Spectrum:a broad range of varied but related ideas or objects, the individual features of which tend to overlap so as to form a continuous series or sequence. (Dictionary.com)
The presence of disability in American public culture is at once increasingly visible and yet still segregated and rendered invisible. In our multi-sited ethnographic research on Disability, Personhood, and “the New Normal” …
The current issue of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry is a special issue, edited by M. Ariel Cascio and entitled “Conceptualizing Autism Around the Globe“. Along with six original articles, the issue is framed by an introduction by Cascio, “Cross-Cultural Autism Studies, Neurodiversity, and Conceptualizations of Autism“, and a closing commentary by Roy Richard Grinker, “Reframing …