Autism Global Emergency: The New Epidemiology, Parenting, Self-Advocacy and Neurodiversity Movement

1. The thema 2. The English paradigm 3. Victor Lotter in Africa and the globalisation of the second autism 4. The American paradigm 5. Society and development models 6. Encountering neurodiversity 7. From parents' associations to self-advocacy 8. Geeks and Great Systematisers 9. The risk of self-self-enforcing-diagnosis and white males in Alabama 10. Is there an autism emergency? Ian Hacking's work has shown the relevance of the autobiographical literature of autism, and how it has contributed to the push, together with statistical methods in the social and biological sciences, for the creation of a new 'state science'. In scientific thinking, one of the favourite styles of reasoning is the statistical analysis of data and the regularities of populations. Knowledge about child development has certainly been shaped by scientific advances, by new discoveries made possible by technological diagnostic tools that were unthinkable just 60 years ago. But this knowledge was determined—and in turn contributed to—by factors such as social, political and economic changes, which in turn determined the variation of legal contexts. It is in this broader international context that new concepts in child development theory and broader changes in approaches to disability in particular are to be found. Proceeding in order, this chapter will describe how the diagnosis of autism has expanded and extended globally, how variations in theory have affected diagnostic criteria, and how and to what extent the movement of autistic families and individuals has affected this process.