Seeing and inviting participation in autistic interactions

Abstract

What does it take to see how autistic people participate in social interactions? And what does it take to support and invite more participation? Western medicine and cognitive science tend to think of autism mainly in terms of social and communicative deficits. But research shows that autistic people can interact with a skill and sophistication that are hard to see when starting from a deficit idea. Research also shows that not only autistic people, but also their non-autistic interaction partners, can have difficulties interacting with each other. To do justice to these findings, we need a different approach to autistic interactions—one that helps everyone see, invite, and support better participation. I introduce such an approach, based on the enactive theory of participatory sense-making and supported by insights from indigenous epistemologies. This approach helps counteract the homogenizing tendencies of the “global mental health” movement, which attempts to erase rather than recognize difference, and often precludes respectful engagements. Based in the lived experiences of people in their socio-cultural-material and interactive contexts, I put forward an engaged—even engag ing—epistemology for understanding how we interact across difference. From this perspective, we see participatory sense-making at work across the scientific, diagnostic, therapeutic, and everyday interactions of autistic and non-autistic people, and how everyone can invite and support more of it.

The Interactional Structure of Accounts During Small Group Discussions Among Autistic Children Receiving Special Education Support in Finland

“…However, other theoretical views center on social interaction instead of relying solely on social cognitive explanations for behavior. For instance, an enactive view proposes that cognition is embodied and non-trivially dependent on the body and enacted (brought forth) through actual engagement with the environment (De Jaegher, 2021;Di Paolo et al, 2018). According to this framework, what drives and maintains the interactions is the principle of self-organization and the fundamental need to enact with the world (including others), not our ability to simulate or predict others' minds.…”

Author’s reply to the commentaries: Clearing up misunderstandings about the course-of-experience framework and laying the groundwork for future discussions

“…Every activity (giving rise to pre-reflective consciousness) is full of distant or close resonances to others and full of interaction/coordination with others (in potential, in virtual, or in actual). As all affordances are ‘social’ (see Baggs, 2021), 4 all actor-environment couplings and sense-makings are ‘social’, and this is so even when social interactions are impeded by individual potentials for entering interaction or by the dynamics of the social encounters itself (de Haan, 2020; De Jaegher, 2013a; 2021; De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007). According to De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007), there is a spectrum of degrees of participation in sense-making from the modulation of individual sense-making by coordination patterns, through orientation, to joint sense-making.…”

The Human Spectrum: A Phenomenological Enquiry within Neurodiversity

“…Our paper aimed to address these issues with an innovative phenomenological enquiry to uncover divergences and continuities across the autistic/non-autistic “divide” (that also runs across the authors). It represents an exercise in exploratory phenomenology and participatory sense-making [12, 13], where we “let each other be” across our respective differences [14] and work together to explore our own and each other’s experience [15]. In doing this, we also undertake the practical first steps in a quite radical form of the collaborative and co-constructed enquiry often now advocated for the field [16, 17].…”