Paper Authors
Toward Neurodiversity: How Conversation Analysis Can Contribute to a New Approach to Social Communication Assessment Betty Yu and Laura Sterponi

Here are a few thoughts on two topics that came up in the discussion:

Describing internal workings without comparison

What does it mean to do research investigating certain skills in a given population without measuring it against a normative standard? This paper presented Conversation Analysis as a way to do exactly that – study autistic (and more broadly, neurodivergent) communication styles without comparing them to neurotypical norms. We wondered what it would look like to do quantitative research, which is what most of us in the group do, with a similar approach. Thinking of autism, I don’t see enough work which is not comparing autism communication/linguistic skills against non-autistic (predominantly neurotypical but sometimes also other neurodivergence) normative levels.
       It was pointed out in the discussion that it is in the nature of the kinds of questions we ask in the quantitative world that makes it difficult to say anything meaningful if we are not comparing against a normative baseline. But then we went on to acknowledge how in the stuttering world for example, we are starting to see more and more of quantitative research with focus on stutterers themselves instead of measuring their linguistic/communicative competence against non-stutterers. Some kind of comparison is probably inherent to all research but comparing a person’s speech when they stutter vs. when they don’t is a very different comparison from one between speech of stutterers and non-stutterers. It is hard to stay truly neutral toward differences but lack of neutrality towards the pair of things being compared can have different implications based on what is being compared. Thinking of the stuttering example again, comparing instances where an individual stutters with when they don’t is more in line with disability justice because individuals’ speech characteristics are being compared to their own speech, that is, they are their own baseline, they are centered in the research. Cross neurotype comparison on the other hand often has an undercurrent of pathologizing divergent traits. It appears that (yet again), stuttering research provides new ways of re-thinking the kinds of questions we ask about neurodivergent groups.
       It was pointed out that the variability of stuttering lends itself more easily to the within-individual type of comparisons which might not be possible or relevant for other populations. I can’t comment on other disabilities but in autism, heterogeneity across people and spiky profiles within individuals are common. Just like socio-emotional factors affect stuttering events, many autistic traits also vary with contextual factors. Yet, comparison with non-autistic people continues to be the main approach. At this point then I am wondering, what does a disabled community benefit more from – learning how they differ from neurotypical norms or how contextual factors affect expression of their own neurodivergent traits? I would think the latter.

Researcher positionality

How much does the researcher’s identity matter? We have previously touched upon the importance of researcher positionality and this paper led us to further reflect on how researchers’ personal identities shape not just what questions are asked but also how they are addressed. CA seems to be a wonderful tool to investigate communication skills in autistic children but the case study presented in this paper made it clear that it would take a LOT of care to analyze interactions using this lens. This analysis is not limited to just the verbal components in an interaction which is both a strength and a challenge for this method. For better or for worse, discourse analysis with an exclusive focus on the linguistic components of interactions makes the process (probably) quite streamlined. The goal of exhaustively identifying all the ways in which a person engages in a conversation might be too lofty, maybe even impossible. So the features the analysts would end up zooming in on would be essentially reflective of how they themselves perceive various conversational moves. Was that glance relevant? What about that shrug? The sigh? The silence? Neurodivergent communication styles are barely studied and probably the best accounts are written by poets and writers, not researchers. How do you know what to look for when you don’t see the world the same way?
       I would not want to go so far as to say that only researchers with aligned neurotypes can do ethical research focused on a given population but I do think it is an important facet of ethical research. Since different marginalized groups tend to be similarly marginalized in the society, a more relaxed take would be to say that it is important to have researchers from various marginalized identities leading the research on marginalized groups, even if they are not in one to one correspondence with the dimension of marginalization (e.g. have BIPOC researchers researching disabilities).

It was suggested that an ND meme page might be fun so that might be coming up next –

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