ActuallyAutistic Twitter as a Site for Epistemic Resistance and Crip Futurity

The Internet has, for several decades, played a critical role in autistic self-advocacy and community building. This semi-autoethnographic, interpretivist study turns to #ActuallyAutistic Twitter to examine autistic concerns about autism research, how these concerns differ from those of autism researchers, and how autistics interact with autism research and researchers. I find that #ActuallyAutistic Twitter discourses align with the neurodiversity paradigm, while dominant autism discourses in the academy align with the medical model of disability. Though both orientations towards autism research sometimes share research priorities, they represent fundamentally irreconcilable approaches to these priorities and autism, more broadly. I explore how autistics on Twitter interact with non-autistic researchers and how the tenor of these interactions varies according to which research paradigm a particular researcher subscribes. I conclude with a discussion of how HCI researchers interested in autism can operationalize these findings by approaching their work through the framework of crip technoscience.