Abstract
In this chapter, I explore how parents and therapists negotiate the meaning of communication with minimally and non-verbal children with autism. Specifically, I share findings from a study of the interactions of children with autism and their parents and therapists. This study was situated within a discursive psychology framework (Edwards & Potter, 1992; Potter & Wetherell, 1987) and informed by critical notions of disability (Oliver, 1996; Thomas, 1999), critical perspectives on communication (Biklen et al., 2005; Biklen & Burke, 2006), and certain aspects of conversation analysis (Sacks, 1992).
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Recommended reading
• Biklen, D., Attfield, R., Bissonnette, L., Blackman, L., Burke, J., Frugone, A., Mukhopadhyay, R. R., & Rubin, S. (2005). Autism and the myth of the person alone. New York, NY: New York University Press.
• Lester, J. N. (2012). Researching the discursive function of silence: A reconsideration of the normative communication patterns in the talk of children with autism labels. In G. S. Cannella & S. R. Steinberg (Eds.), Critical qualitative research reader (pp. 329–340). New York: Peter Lang.
• Rossetti, Z., Ashby, C., Arndt, K., Chadwick, M., & Kasahara, M. (2008). ‘I like others to not try to fix me:’ Agency, independence, and autism. Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, 46(5), 364–375.
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© 2015 Jessica Nina Lester
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Lester, J.N. (2015). Presuming Communicative Competence with Children with Autism: A Discourse Analysis of the Rhetoric of Communication Privilege. In: O’Reilly, M., Lester, J.N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Child Mental Health. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137428318_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137428318_24
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