The embodied becoming of autism and childhood: a storytelling methodology

Abstract

In this article I explore a methodology of storytelling as a means of bringing together research around autism and childhood in a new way, as a site of the embodied becoming of autism and childhood. Through reflection on an ethnographic story of embodiment, the body is explored as a site of knowledge production that contests its dominantly storied subjectivation as a ‘disordered’ child. Storytelling is used to experiment with a line of flight from the autistic-child-research assemblage into new spaces of potential and possibility where the becomings of bodies within the collision of autism and childhood can be celebrated.

Keywords:

• Disability
• childhood
• autism
• methodology
• storytelling
• embodiment

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank The University of Sheffield Faculty of Social Science for their PhD scholarship support and also The Autism Centre, Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University.

Notes

1. I take ‘unruly’ from Erevelles (2000) as the body that does not adhere to or meet humanist standards of the rational, contained, non-disabled body. I choose it for its theoretical associations and equally for what I feel the word and its sound connotates – movement, freedom, arms and legs everywhere. Sophie’s body in that morning embodied unruliness.