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Podcast: New Books in Medicine
Episode: Catherine Tan, "Spaces on the Spectrum: How Autism Movements Resist Experts and Create Knowledge" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Description: Movements that take issue with conventional understandings of autism spectrum disorder, a developmental disability, have become increasingly visible. Drawing on more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with participants, Dr. Catherine Tan investigates two autism-focused movements, shedding new light on how members contest expert authority. Examining their separate struggles to gain legitimacy and represent autistic people, she develops a new account of the importance of social movements as spaces for constructing knowledge that aims to challenge dominant frameworks.Spaces on the Spectrum: How Autism Movements Resist Experts and Create Knowledge (Columbia University Press, 2024) examines the a...