Spaces on the Spectrum

How Autism Movements Resist Experts and Create Knowledge

Catherine Tan

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Hardback

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English

Columbia University Press
23 January 2024

Sociology; Abnormal psychology; Political activism

Movements that take issue with conventional understandings of autism spectrum disorder, a developmental disability, have become increasingly visible. Drawing on more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with participants, Catherine Tan investigates two autism-focused movements, shedding new light on how members contest expert authority. Examining their separate struggles to gain legitimacy and represent autistic people, she develops a new account of the importance of social movements as spaces for constructing knowledge that aims to challenge dominant frameworks.

Spaces on the Spectrum examines the autistic rights and alternative biomedical movements, which reimagine autism in different and conflicting ways: as a difference to be accepted or as a sickness to treat. Both, however, provide a window into how ideas that conflict with dominant beliefs develop, take hold, and persist. The autistic rights movement is composed primarily of autistic adults who contend that autism is a natural human variation, not a disorder, and advocate for social and cultural inclusion and policy changes. The alternative biomedical movement, in contrast, is dominated by parents and practitioners who believe in the disproven idea that vaccines trigger autism and seek to reverse it with scientifically unsupported treatments. Both movements position themselves in opposition to researchers, professionals, and parents outside their communities. Spaces on the Spectrum offers timely insights into the roles of shared identity and communal networks in movements that question scientific and medical authority.

By: Catherine Tan
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm,
ISBN: 9780231206129
ISBN 10: 0231206127
Pages: 400
Publication Date: 23 January 2024
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Catherine Tan is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Vassar College.

Reviews for Spaces on the Spectrum: How Autism Movements Resist Experts and Create Knowledge

With engaging data, compelling stories, and compassionate insight, Catherine Tan brings us into the competing and complementary worlds of autism advocacy. Spaces on the Spectrum provides an important exploration of how two different world views of autism have led parents of autistic children and autistic adults to dramatically different beliefs about what causes the condition, what it means, and what, if anything, should be done. This is an important contribution that shows how knowledge production is contentious, how meanings of expertise can be multi-faceted and contradictory, and how calls for sympathy and respect can place well-intentioned people who care deeply about the same issue at odds. -- Jennifer A. Reich, author of <i>Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines</i>