- 2020 to present -
Disability Justice Dissertation
Project Details
My dissertation research focuses on the experiences of autistic graduate students and involves the co-creation of recommendations for better supporting autistic graduate students that may be shared with graduate schools, faculty, and graduate students themselves. As an autistic graduate student myself, I reserve space in this project to unpack my own experiences as both student and researcher through the complex experience that is doctoral studies.
A collectively storied account of autistic graduate school experiences
Title
2020 - present
Year
Autoethnography (Bochner & Ellis, 2002)
Co-analysis of data (Scott-Barrett et al., 2023)
Qualitative arts-informed methods (Leavy, 2020)
Methods
Dr. Patty Douglas
Supervisor
Questions
What stories are autistic graduate students willing to share about their study experiences in graduate school?
What patterns, differences, and curiosities arise from the collection of stories
What ideas and advice do autistic graduate students recommend so that institutions and faculty can better support autistic graduate students?
What story can I tell about my own experience becoming an autistic academic researcher?
What moments stood out to me, and what significance did they hold?
How have I responded to challenges and successes in my program?
How do I define my scholarly practice as I emerge from the doctoral program?
Paradigm: Transformative, centering human rights and social justice as a primary goal of research (Mertens, 2013).
Ontology: Post-normal Eurocentric society where power and difference have real implications in life (Sardar, 2009) and academic rewilding offers individuals a way to bring their authentic selves into an otherwise neoliberal institution (Moriarty, 2020).
Epistemology: Situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988) and epistemic injustice (Catala, 2024), where knowledges are connected to positioning and experiences of marginalized people are excluded, erased, or otherwise dismissed through incidental and/or systemic biases.
Axiology: Decolonized, guided by the Six Rs of Indigenous Research Ethics (Tsosie et al., 2022).
Methodology: A/r/tography, to systematically examine the living connections between art, research, and knowledge translation activities in my scholarship (Irwin, 2018), and embedding cripped cultural practices, to facilitate autistic world building at the nexus of neurodivergence, inclusion, and graduate studies (Chandler et al., 2023).
Framework
Results
Stay tuned!