Who needs to (un)know? On the generative possibilities of ignorance for autistic futures

Abstract

This article advances an (anti)agenda that would center unknowing as a necessary tool to remake autism. While much of the literature on the social study of ignorance describes its corrosive effects for democracy or how ignorance fuels epistemic injustice, I argue that some harms committed against autistic people have come from well-meaning attempts to know. A newly invigorated “critical” autism studies could foreground a project of ignorance to catalogue the varieties of unknowing that can recenter and remake autism. This does not entail simply supplanting “expert” knowledge with “non-expert” knowledge from the purified perspective of situated, autistic knowers; rather it disrupts feel-good narratives in which any efforts to rescue subjugated knowledges are hailed as undeniably progressive, a practice in which autistic knowers can become ensnared. Unknowing autism can propel the generative possibilities of failure, and futures in which efforts to reproduce dominant ways of knowing are resisted.

Keywords:

• Critical autism studies
• autism
• ignorance
• epistemology
• unknowing

Acknowledgements

As someone who does not identify as autistic, I tread on this ground with trepidation, and with a recognition that my own thoughts and feelings about autism are still in the process of becoming. So the task of unknowing is something that I must undertake, as well. The anonymous reviewers of this article provided spot-on feedback and constructive engagement with the text. These were among the most thoughtful comments I have received on a journal article submission in my entire career. Thanks are due to the guest editors for the invitation to submit to this special issue, and for allowing me to be in the company of such brilliant colleagues. Much appreciation to one of those colleagues, Dr. Sara M. Acevedo, for soothing my anxieties related to all things Deleuzian.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a rich, textured analysis of the work undertaken in the name of Applied Behaviour Analysis, see Gruson-Wood (2016).

2 In Canada, Dr. Stephen Scherer has attracted significant attention for his research on the links between autism and genetics. Referred to as “just an ordinary superstar” by the country’s main funder of health-related research, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/49529.html), Dr. Scherer has been identified as a leading contender for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Scherer is best known for his collaboration with Autism Speaks and Google, among others, on the MSSNG project to “create the world’s largest genomic database on autism” (https://www.autismspeaks.ca/being-a-catalyst-for-life-enhancing-research-breakthroughs/#MSSNG).

3 Thanks to the reviewer for alerting me to this important, but unresolved tension. There is no doubt that liberal models of accommodation and inclusion can be seen as failures in both productive (and perhaps unproductive) senses of the term. They are productive if they reveal potential possibilities or ways forward.

4 Thanks to a most perceptive reviewer for drawing my attention to the link between my discussion of unknowing and the Deleuzian notion of deterritorialization/reterritorialization. My brief discussion here is admittedly incomplete. For an interesting discussion of deterritorialization as it applies to health, see Fox (2002).

5 I recognize here that the academy is home to researchers who identify as autistic. The broader point I am trying to make concerns the discipline imposed on academic researchers with regard to what counts as legitimate knowledge.

6 They produced In My Language under the name “Amanda Baggs.”

7 Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission produced a six-volume final report in 2015, which included a series of 94 calls to action. Its research led to the most comprehensive record of the residential school system that operated in Canada. All of the key documents are now available through the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation: https://nctr.ca/records/reports/

8 Dotson’s important critique adds a third form of epistemic injustice, which she terms “contributory injustice.” Contributory injustice “is caused by an epistemic agent’s situated ignorance, in the form of willful hermeneutical ignorance, in maintaining and utilizing structurally prejudiced hermeneutical resources that result in epistemic harm to the epistemic agency of a knower. Both the structurally prejudiced or biased hermeneutical resources and the agent’s situated ignorance are catalysts for contributory injustice. As such, it is located within the gray area between agential and structural perpetuation of epistemic injustice” (Dotson, 2012, p. 31). Dotson takes issue with Fricker’s claim that everyone depends upon “one set of collective hermeneutical resources.”

9 The notion of “colonial unknowing” is discussed in an introduction to a special issue of the journal Theory and Event by Vimalassery, Pegues and Goldstein (2016). One form in which this unknowing can take place is through colonial agnosia, understood as “the profound investment in maintaining the failure to comprehend the realities of colonialism by those people who might most benefit from these conditions. Colonial agnosia refuses relationality (Vimalassery, Pegues and Goldstein, 2016, p. 2). The authors use the term in a way that resists a pathologizing or ableist construction.

10 Woods et al. (2018) discuss the importance to autistic people of the process of self-diagnosis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Orsini

Michael Orsini is Professor in Feminist and Gender Studies and Political Studies at the University of Ottawa (Canada). He is interested in critical approaches to health politics and policy, and in the role of marginalized communities in policy making.