Autistic Intelligence

"""Autistic Intelligence: Interaction, Individuality, and the Challenges of Diagnosis proposes and characterizes a way of understanding autistic strengths, based on research conducted in two decades: the mid-1980s and the mid-2010s . . .  Autistic Intelligence is rich with stories and very readable . . . [It] richly unpacks these stories and provides tools for perhaps remaking them."" * Social Service Review * ""Drawing on a decade of collaboration and co-authoring, not to mention Maynard’s illustrious forty-year career dissecting social interactions, Autistic Intelligence is the result of systematic and dedicated research into the psychological label of our time. The book shifts attention from the internal processes that predominate in public representations of autism to the space between autistic people and the contexts that constitute their life worlds."" * Social Forces * ""Autism diagnoses have been on the rise for years. . . Thus, a book about the process of arriving at, and communicating, such diagnoses is important and timely, and an adroitly executed book such as Autistic Intelligence: Interaction, Individuality, and the Challenges of Diagnosis is especially welcome."" * American Journal of Sociology * “A creative and original ethnographic study of a clinic at which developmental disabilities are diagnosed. Maynard and Turowetz introduce new analytical tools to understand the nature and varieties of autistic intelligence.” -- Mitchell Duneier, Princeton University ""An authoritative challenge to conventional public and expert orientations toward autism, this is an ethnography about meaning-making that is brilliant in its own way.” -- Harvey Molotch, New York University ""In Autistic Intelligence: Interaction, Individuality, and the Challenges of Diagnosis, Maynard and Turowetz offer a detailed and caring investigation of the autism diagnostic process. Drawing on a wealth of data and personal experience with autism spectrum disorders, the authors argue for expanding everyday interactional repertoires to enable intersubjectivity (co-meaning making) with autistic people, increasing the flexibility of the commonsense repertoires we all use to navigate the world."" -- Alexandra H. Vinson * Symbolic Interaction *"