Autistic Intelligence

Interaction, Individuality, and the Challenges of Diagnosis

Author: Douglas W. Maynard and Jason Turowetz

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Examines the diagnostic process to question how we understand autism as a category and to better recognize its intelligence and uncommon sense.

As autism has become a widely prevalent diagnosis, we have grown increasingly desperate to understand it. Whether by placing baseless blame on vaccinations or seeking a genetic cause, Americans have struggled to understand what autism is and where it comes from. In Autistic Intelligence, Douglas Maynard and Jason Turowetz focus on a different origin of autism: the diagnostic process. By looking at how autism is diagnosed, they ask us to question the norms we use to measure autistic behavior against, why we understand autistic behavior as disordered, and how we go about assigning that disorder to particular people.

To do so, the authors take a close look at a clinic in which children are assessed for and diagnosed with autism. Their research draws on hours observing assessment evaluations among psychologists, pediatricians, parents, and children in order to make plain the systems, language, and categories that clinicians rely upon when making their assessments. Those diagnostic tools determine the kind of information doctors can gather about children, and indeed, those assessments affect how children act. Autistic Intelligence shows that autism is not a stable category, but the result of an interpretive act, and in the process of diagnosing children with autism, we often miss all of the unique contributions they make to the world around them.

Critic Reviews

“"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."”

"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

About the Author

Douglas W. Maynard is the Maureen T. Hallinan Professor of Sociology, emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is author or editor of numerous books, including Bad News, Good News: Conversational Order in Everyday Talk and Clinical Settings, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Jason Turowetz is postdoctoral research fellow at the the University of Siegen's Center for Media of Cooperation with an appointment at the Garfinkel archive in Newburyport, MA. He is the author of over thirty academic articles and co-author of Morality in the Making: Stanley Milgram’s ‘Obedience’ Experiments and the New Science of Morality (forthcoming from Oxford University Press).