Description
Autistic people often experience difficulties with social communication. This can impact all areas of life and can contribute to poorer mental health outcomes, reduced opportunities for fulfilling social interactions and barriers to health and social care, education and employment. This book offers a new way of understanding why cross-neurotype mis attunements in communication may happen by taking the double empathy problem – the reframing of social communication difficulties as a two-way problem, not simply the result of an autistic ‘deficit’ – and a little-known cognitive linguistics theory, ‘relevance theory’, as a starting point.
Weaving together threads from critical autism studies, a social-justice perspective, cognitive science, linguistics and sociology, this book leads the reader towards a new, radical perspective of how we can understand these breakdowns in understanding.
Author
Gemma Williams is an autistic autism researcher, musician and ex-beekeeper, living in Sussex. Gemma is a linguist by heart, but following her ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Brighton in Social Policy, her research interests have extended to more social justice-related issues, including: autistic people’s experiences of loneliness, barriers to healthcare for neurodivergent people, sensory environments of public spaces and, most recently autistic reproductive and gynecological healthcare.
Gemma is a member of the Westminster Commission on Autism and an Associate with the National Development Team for Inclusion where she’s contributed to a number of commissioned reports, projects and inquiries aimed at improving service provision for autistic and neurodivergent people within the UK, NHS England and Local Authorities.
Details
Publisher: Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd
ISBN: 9781803883700
Publication date: July 2024
Pages: 188
Content
Introduction
Section 1 – Considers different perspectives on how communication and shared meaning is achieved
1: Knowing and understanding by being in the world
2: Knowing and understanding others
3: Making sense in a complex world
Section 2 – Provides a critical summary of what has been meant by the term ‘autism’ since its conception
4: So, what is autism?
5: Autistic language use: a short history
Section 3 – A suggestion for how we might understand why communication often breaks down between autistic and non-autistic people
6: The Double Empathy Problem
7: Mind the gap
8: But how’s that relevant?
Section 4 – considers the social exclusion of autistic people and how this can add to the communication breakdowns and impact access to services and quality of life.
9: The importance of getting it right
10: The importance of intersectional thinking
11: Towards a connected, inclusive society
Dr Rebecca Jackson (PhD, PgCAP, PPDip) –
Understanding others in a Neurodiverse World is a book I read cover-to-cover in one afternoon, in full monotropic flow, with all parts of my identity (researcher, relevance-theorist, coaching psychologist, autist) fully alive, engaged and…fully seen. It is a fascinating work that blends well-explained, accessible theory about the nature of minds and the nature of communication with vignettes dripping with nature-based references and the autistic life experience of the author. It culminates in a hopeful and hoped-for push for understanding and interpretive generosity when a range of minds meet, offering wit, nuance, and a thoughtful consideration of autistic intersectional experience along the way.
Nichi Hodgson – Journalist –
I thought I knew few things about neurodivergence – but as this book showed me, I had barely scratched the surface of understanding.
‘This is a book about magic,’ so begins Dr Gemma Williams, and by that she means the not-too-minor miracle that is any given human being able to communicate with another.
But as Williams shows, the challenge that neurodivergent people face in making themselves heard and understood, is on an utterly different scale.
Charting the multifarious linguistic theories that have contributed to our understanding of this communication, Williams weaves in humorous personal anecdotes from her own experience of being autistic, along with sobering facts on the realities of communicating from a place of presumed deficit. Her chapter on the loneliness of autistic people is particularly stark.
We could all do well to better understand just how much neurodivergent people accommodate others through the course of their lives. With verve, empathy, and incision, this book details how, and makes suggestions for how we can all improve our communication.