“Autism in practice” : establishing, maintaining, and understanding friendships among autistic adults in British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation explores the lived experiences of autistic adults living in British Columbia in Canada and examines how they socialize and experience friendship relations. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this work answers the following: 1) What are autistics’ experiences of the physiological barriers that may affect autistics’ social interaction, communication, and relationships? how do autistics describe and deal with these barriers? 2) How do autistics describe their relationships with the people they call “friends,” and how do they create and sustain these relationships? 3) What can we learn from the practices of friendship among autistics, and their coping strategies for everyday challenges, about the everyday and life experience of being an autistic? By answering these questions, this study provides an anthropological analysis that illuminates the perceptual-physical grounding of experience and demonstrates how aspects of embodiment construct as well as explain relatedness and sociability, and the processes of developing intersubjectivity and morality in autistics’ friendships. Specifically, it shows that there are three main issues that explain friendship and sociability among autistics: Unusual sensory perception, social communication difficulties, and personal histories and negative lived experiences. By adopting diverse sensory, communicative, and social coping strategies, autistics constantly adapt their previous sensory, communicative, and social experiences to particular social environments, and try to develop effective communication and intersubjectivity that enable them to engage in friendships and intimate relationships. These ongoing adaptative processes, which reflect the stress of social interaction and the intense desire for it, produce distinctive patterns and perceptions of friendship among autistics and generate a different way of practicing friendship. Accordingly, to understand what autistics define as “friendship,” I argue, this form of relatedness must be examined in the broader context of personal difficulties, particularly sensory-embodied experiences, physical environments, social-cultural attitudes and reactions, and the lived experiences of autistics, all of which intersect and construct the nature of friendship among autistics. By contextualizing friendship, my findings question assumptions about autism as a lack of interest in social interaction, and contribute to an understanding of autism as a complex corporeal and social experience, rather than a purely medical or neurodevelopmental condition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".