Between category and experience: constructing autism,constructing critical practice

This article aims to contribute to an emancipatory conceptual framework for EPs to draw upon when called to work with and/or speak of individuals labelled autistic. First, the widespread adherence to medicalised, inherently deficit-based discourses surrounding autism is critiqued, and considered as not uniformly beneficial for “clients” (parents, teachers and, above all, young people). The authors then utilise alternative critical constructions of autism, positioning those identified as autistic at the centre of a more transparent discursive (re)construction. This approach, it is argued, opens up spaces in which celebration of individual difference is as much a possibility as psychopathology, and supports practitioners to remain sensitive to complex forms of lived experience. The authors do not speak for the autistic community (or assume a coherence in viewpoint), but hope this article speaks to those labelled autistic (and to professionals) in a way that more established approaches may not.