Research that engages the experiences and insights of autistics and their caregivers can be more ethical, less stigmatizing, and innovative. To avoid reproducing established assumptions, researchers should learn how autistics and their caregivers understand behavioral and communicative differences, and how they prioritize interventions and accommodations. Fostering “autistic flourishing” requires that researchers focus on similarities between autistics and neurotypical people while allowing for autistic differences. Consulting autistics helps ensure that their personhood is acknowledged.

The autism spectrum disorders are a group of neurodevelopmental syndromes ofcommunication, behavior and social cognition. Over the past decade, they havereceived increasing attention from scholars in the social sciences. Thisresearch has been motivated by the prospect of critiquing and improving supportservices and therapies, by self-advocates who have argued that autism should betolerated as a form of difference rather than treated as a disorder, and by theinterest inherent in syndromes that seem to affect many of the attributes thatwe use to define personhood. In this commentary, I review social scienceresearch on the autism spectrum. I identify some key approaches in the work,including the idea of autism as a culture, transcultural comparisons, studiesbased on treatment strategies, investigations of subjectivity and interpersonalrelations, and research on social movements. In the process, I suggest somefurther directions for this area of research. I also consider some reasons whythe autism spectrum disorders are a particularly interesting site for studies ofthe ways that biomedical information is used to craft individual and groupidentities.