Living Autism

In April, for Autism Awareness Month, we invited Annika Bergman Rosamond and Ben Rosamond to reflect on what it means to practice feminist parenting for a child with autism.

"Pals" by Oscar Rosamond

Living Autism

By Annika Bergman Rosamond and Ben Rosamond

April is Autism awareness month with a range of autism and other organisations taking the opportunity to declare publicly their commitment to neurodiverse justice, expressing their willingness to take on more staff with autism and ensuring that their organisational structures are not discriminatory, but rather can cater for neurodiverse people’s needs and wants. Thus, once a year, autism is attracting attention around the world reminding us all that there are many ways of living and being a human. 

For some of us autism and neurodiversity are constant factors in our lives. We are parents and carers of a 14-year-old boy who has what some might consider high functioning autism - a talented artist, kind, crafty, very funny, a lover of the outdoors and (especially) museums. But he is different and much of our time is spent trying to work with that difference both to help him navigate a world that is structured at every turn for the neuro-typical and to get closer to understanding what makes him tick, what he needs and (frankly) who he is.

Our child has a considerable speech impairment which has turned us into speech therapists. We’ve received some training for that, but helping him in his efforts to talk and communicate is also a journey of daily discovery. This is a rewarding but relentless job that never ends. We are also our kid’s best friends, in the absence of other friendships, which is a privilege but also a source of sadness. It’s sad for us that conventional peer-group friendship is missing from his life, and we often wonder whether it makes him sad or whether it bothers him. We honestly don’t know. 

Our approach to caring for our son is feminist in all respects. We share our care responsibilities 50-50, and traditional gender roles do not come into that division. We are both mum and dad and everything in between. Our son is not particularly interested in traditional notions of maternal care or firmly-established gender roles. Despite being exposed, like everyone else, to heteronormative representations of these, they don’t seem to have any bearing on how he sees the world or how (or whether) he classifies the people he meets.

In our role as carers and parents we seek to cater for our son’s special interests. Take the example of museums – a visible, visceral passion of his since he was small. He visits these in person and virtually, delighting in the rediscovery of favourite exhibits or googling his way to finding pieces that are no longer on display (the wonderful, fragile 1920s robot orchestra from Malmö’s Technical Museum being a prime example of the latter, which he also routinely integrates into his art). One thing we have learnt from accompanying him to museums is his astonishing memory. An eight-year gap between visits to Edinburgh’s National Museum of Scotland (now a weekly haunt) was no barrier to our boy simply picking up where he left off, confidently navigating his way around the place as if it was the easiest thing in the world. 

He encounters museums differently and in ways that don’t necessarily accord with how they are designed or what might be considered their showcase exhibits. He often alights upon, photographs, talks about and draws pictures of the most mundane exhibits, such as the two mannequins in naval uniform standing at each end of the aforementioned Technical Museum’s star piece, a 1942 Swedish U3 submarine. As he sees it, the sailor and the officer are the real stars. While other visitors process through the innards of the submarine, he will stand in front of the mannequins, snapping photos and telling stories about them. 

And then there is Stockholm’s Army Museum. Our wee laddie knows each part of this place and is particularly interested in the display of soldiers, though not, we think, because they represent masculinised powerful men, but rather because their appeal is aesthetic – something to be emulated in his art. Through his neurodiverse perception of reality, we have learnt so much about the ways in which museums tend to cater for neurotypical spectators, often lacking in nuance in their narration of history and politics. As scholars of global politics, we are not only interested in the aesthetics of war and conflict, but perhaps are more inclined to want to talk about peace and what makes for sustainable peace, and inviting our son to reflect upon the relationality between war and peace and the gendered dynamics undergirding both processes. In some ways, because of the complexities of communication, that is hard. In other ways it’s easier since he simply lacks the gendered priors. 

Over the years, we have had the privilege of teaching neurodiverse students. They are often brilliant, but equally they can find many aspects of university life challenging. For both of us it has been an asset to live autism, it has made us (we hope) better listeners and more humble teachers, drawing upon what we know about autism and seeking to implement our lived experiences within and outside the classroom. Our son has taught us that being a university teacher is, in significant part, about exercising care and grasping that people learn in different ways. What might seem self-evident as a research puzzle might not appear that way to some, not because they are deficient as learners, but because they are wired differently. Neurodiverse students can often make bold, counter-intuitive connections in their learning, but they can feel tyrannised by simple things like deadlines, expectations that they be active in class or the idea that learning should be structured in a pre-given way. Living autism has taught us that, as educators, we can learn to be better and more attentive and creative in ‘testing’ our students’ knowledge and there is no doubt that universities have much to do if they are fully to grasp the implications of neurodiversity. 

Author Bios

Annika Bergman-Rosamond is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Gender at the University of Edinburgh an international relations and gender scholar whose work stretches across a range of fields including feminist foreign policy, feminist security studies, gender cosmopolitanism and care ethics, feminist peace and digital diplomacy, critical military studies, the study of crisis, populism and gendered nationalism,  human rights and environmental justice as well as intersectionality.

Ben Rosamond is Professor of Politics and International Relations and Head of Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. Ben  works  at  the  intersection  of  International  Political  Economy  and European Union studies with his current research and teaching interests covering the politics of  economic  ideas  and  economic  expertise,  the  political  economy  of  Brexit,  the  politics  of European  disintegration, the sociology of academic knowledge and the politics and governance of crisis.