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ERIC Number: EJ1474444
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025
Pages: 18
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0951-8398
EISSN: EISSN-1366-5898
Available Date: 0000-00-00
Who Needs to (Un)Know? On the Generative Possibilities of Ignorance for Autistic Futures
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE), v38 n5 p640-657 2025
This article advances an (anti)agenda that would center unknowing as a necessary tool to remake autism. While much of the literature on the social study of ignorance describes its corrosive effects for democracy or how ignorance fuels epistemic injustice, I argue that some harms committed against autistic people have come from well-meaning attempts to know. A newly invigorated "critical" autism studies could foreground a project of ignorance to catalogue the varieties of unknowing that can recenter and remake autism. This does not entail simply supplanting "expert" knowledge with "non-expert" knowledge from the purified perspective of situated, autistic knowers; rather it disrupts feel-good narratives in which any efforts to rescue subjugated knowledges are hailed as undeniably progressive, a practice in which autistic knowers can become ensnared. Unknowing autism can propel the generative possibilities of failure, and futures in which efforts to reproduce dominant ways of knowing are resisted.
Taylor & Francis. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada