Engaging with “Crip Horizons” in the Study of Autistic Identity: A Discursive Project

In this chapter, I describe how I navigated a 2-year ethnography wherein I explored how autism was performed as an interactional event among children diagnosed with autism, the therapists who worked with them, and their parents. Thinking with critical disability studies, discursive psychology, and postcritical understandings of ethnography, I argue for the value of ethnographers engaging with critical conceptions of disability, where disability may even be imagined as desirable. I offer two descriptions of tension points in this work, drawing upon data, primarily fieldnotes and researcher journal entries to illustrate challenges I face in representing this work, and my engagement with crip horizons.