Rebecca-Eli Mica Long

ABSTRACT SUBMITTED: Combining approaches from disability, life course, and multimodal anthropologies, this project sought to make autistic futures more possible by contributing to equitable and inclusive knowledge of autistic adulthood. This project explored autistic adults’ interests and passions (colloquially known as “special interests”) and what these interests reveal about how autistic people craft meaningful lives in the context of the contemporary U.S. autistic self-advocacy movement. In taking up crafting as a conceptual and methodological framework, this project contributes to diverse forms of knowledge creation through the autistic researcher’s own interest of knitting. Knitting provided an opportunity to attune ethnographic methods to autistic ways of knowing and being across three strands of work: collaborative pattern design, a virtual crafting circle, and critical reflexive knitting. Through these strands, “special interests” emerged as a site of autistic expertise and self-definition about what it means to be autistic. Research revealed multiple ways of understanding “special interests,” demonstrating that autistic culture is a nuanced and ongoing process. This project takes up neurodiversity not simply as an ontological claim about human cognitive variation but as an epistemological opportunity to consider what and whose knowledge is taken as meaningful.