More-than-verbal dialogues: Exploring communication in families of young people on the autism spectrum

Driver, Helen (2019) More-than-verbal dialogues: Exploring communication in families of young people on the autism spectrum. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

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Abstract

Within a social, political and educational narrative of stigma and exclusion relating to autism, this study engaged an autoethnographic participatory action research (APAR) approach to explore communication in families of young people on the autism spectrum. By engaging in collaborative learning within and between five families, the research process centred autistic young people in their families as co-researchers. Through communicative action and enaction, families explored what communication looked like in their family. Mothers established a collaborative learning group. Across a 10-month period they met and discussed communication, reflecting on their family communication interactions. These meetings and reflective journals, which held artefacts from young people and stories and reflections on family communication interaction, provided our data. Through this research assemblage of words, bodies, families and homes we recognised the more-than-verbal dialogues of embodied and enmeshed communication interactions.
Analysis exposed the importance of communicative space as a catalyst to the inclusion of embodiment, connections and self-narrative of autistic young people in communicative enaction. Homes provided liminal spaces of mutual becoming through enacting collaborative learning.

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