Dis/orientating Autism, Childhood, and Dis/ability: Developing Social Theory for Disabled Childhoods

This book considers the many ways autistic lives have been dominantly storied historically, politically, socially, and culturally. Using a range of transdisciplinary theory, the author develops a theoretically rich approach termed ‘dis/orientation’, which breaks new ground for autism research’s understanding of everyday life, and everyday childhoods. The book uses stories of everyday life to provoke new analyses of what it means to talk about, live with, and become, an autistic child: these stories of schooling and education highlight what is done to  autistic bodies, what is done by these bodies, and what becomes between them. This offers a way in to the theoretical work of dis/orientation; a practice and an ethic, that means remaining ever watchful for single orientations towards (and away from) autism and childhood, and the children living those childhoods. This leads to new disciplinary grounds, a reconceptualisation of the terrains of research and practice, not of the disordered and disembodied autistic mind, but of the embodied, lived, and everyday.