The approach taken in this project develops a view that autism is something that is located within specific cultural and historical contexts rather than a medical fact that is unchanged across contexts. This, critical approach to autism, is a newly emerging field of academic enquiry as well as having applications into everyday life. Individual_s narratives/stories of themselves, cultural expressions such as art and literature, legal texts, scientific texts, health manuals, autobiographies, newspapers, magazines, political activism and interviews, etc. as well as within cultural understandings of identity, cognitive capacity, etc. all place autism in particular ways in different cultural contexts. The project would enable academics from the UK and Sweden to engage in a series of meetings and dialogues to explore how autism is experienced, acted upon and understood within and across their cultural contexts.

Dr Lindsay O'Dell (the Open University, UK) and Associate Professor Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist (Umea University, Sweden) would visit each other to refine conceptual tools for a nuanced understanding of comparison across Swedish and British contexts. The conceptual frame to be developed is intercontextual ie it does not seek to offer, or assume, a cross cultural perspective on autism; neither does it offer, or suggest, that autism is a universal diagnostic or experiential truth understood similarly across cultural contexts. Rather, the vantage points of the academics in the UK and Sweden provide different cultural contexts within which to examine the construction of autism as discursively produced with material consequences.