Being non-speaking in a speaking world: Surfacing the improvisations of autistic individuals

In our speech-centric, hearing-privileged world (Savarese, 2022), the production of oral-acoustic speech and the ability to hear the speech of others are often prerequisites for social participation. In like vein, to carry the diagnostic label of “Autism” is to be clinically characterized as having a deficit in social communication (DSM-5, 2013). Augmentative Alternative Communication (AAC) has been touted as solution for non-speaking autistic communicators (Mirenda, 2008). Yet, even in the therapeutic realm of AAC, speech is privileged. Non-speaking autistic individuals have unique communicative practices, and their differently disposed neurotypical interactants may experience surprise or even chagrin (Maynard & Turowetz, 2022) when they perform social actions that are not ‘typical’ (Milton, 2012). However, every living being is in constant attunement with the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1962), invoking the social and material environment in various ways to convey what one wants to say or do (C. Goodwin, 1995, 2004, 2018), interweaving multiple modalities to augment their communication (Savarese, 2022). Beginning a research agenda around surfacing the multiple modalities used by non-speaking autistic individuals, if we—family members, clinicians, educators, scholars—subverted the production of speech in daily interaction, then what interactional practices do we center? Through integrating: (1) reflexive video-based fieldwork; (2) microanalyses of embodied interaction; and (3) design and development of novel tools for communication, this three-paper dissertation surfaces the everyday embodied interactions of non/minimally-speaking autistic individuals. The first study in this dissertation examines the everyday social interactions of two differently-disposed actors—a non-speaking autistic child and his speaking mother—who achieve and sustain joint attention through dialogic turn-taking during small activities at home. The study surfaces how the child is intervened upon through demands to talk by his mother. However, the child defies these demands by co-creating long sequences of interaction with his mother, in which he agentively achieves his own goals in the midst of conflicting agendas. The study highlights a longstanding tension between a traditional medically-driven approach to disability, which emphasizes individual remediation, and a call to subversion by the disability community for rights to communicative diversity. The second study in this dissertation examines the participant roles the researcher embodies during the process of conducting video-based fieldwork involving non-speaking autistic participants, and how the actions of the researcher can have great influence over the course of the unfolding interactions being documented. Studying these roles unearths participant orientations to the camera, the complex interactional work undertaken by the researcher, and ethical dilemmas when the positionality of the researcher becomes blurred. The third study integrates reflexive video-based fieldwork within iterative cycles of design-based research. As a critique of the bias towards referential language production in traditional AAC design and daily verbal conversation, this study designs and brings novel artifacts—floormats that map interpersonal touch to sound—into the homes of non-speaking autistic children. Instead of intervening on the child, the study intervenes on their environment in order to consistently forefront social actions—such as interactive stimming (Dickerson et al., 2007; Chen, 2016; Chen, in preparation; Sinclair, 2010)—within the repertoire of the more vulnerable communicator, allowing adult interlocutors to move beyond speech and participate in embodied interaction with the child. Overall, this dissertation expands on empirical accounts of the communicative competencies of non/minimally-speaking autistic individuals (Chen, 2013, 2016, 2021, 2022; Dindar, 2017; Jaswal et al., 2020; Ochs et al., 2005; Prado & Bucholtz, 2021; Solomon, 2010b), and particularly, the participation of stims in social interaction (Chen, 2016, 2022; Dickerson et al., 2007). The embodied interactions of non-speaking autistic individuals are likened to the cultural practice of improvisation, where multisensory exploration and the creation of new structures is co-achieved by multiple interactants. Through combining different methodological approaches and practicing reflexivity throughout the research process, this dissertation bears implications for the design of therapeutic interventions for the communicative wellbeing of non-speaking autistic individuals. Non-speaking autistic individuals have spent too long accommodating to us. It is time we—speaking interlocutors—began listening to them.

Advisor: Abrahamson, Dor
Yu, Betty