Unknowing in Practice: The Promise of Discomfort, Failure and Uncertainty in Neurodiversity Studies

I started studying autism a decade ago as a neurotypical, non-disabled graduate student with a clear idea of what autism is. Since then, pretty much everything I thought I knew about autism, and indeed myself, has largely unravelled. A sense of lacking legitimacy in researching autism as a non-autistic academic – particularly within Critical Autism Studies with its commitment to experiential knowledge – further made for a research journey exemplified by a near-paralysing sense of discomfort, failure and uncertainty. Initially experiencing these sensations as barriers to working in the field, I gradually came to see them as productive and necessary elements of ‘unknowing’, a potential methodological and ethical approach to autism and Neurodiversity Studies. Here, I describe how I came to this way of thinking before briefly sketching out a tentative notion of what unknowing might be and do. While a few scholars have pointed to the ethical and methodological interest of forms of unknowing, none to my knowledge has suggested in simple, concrete terms some ways it might be operationalised in research. For this article, I therefore lean largely on personal experience and focus more on practice than on theory.