#DisabilityHistoryMonth
The Enduring Legacy of ‘A Future Made Together’ – revisiting a piece of CRAE’s autism research history that continues to shape our thinking about research today.
Back in 2013 A Future Made Together (Pellicano et al.) was collectively authored at a moment when autistic people were increasingly questioning who held the power in autism research. It showed what many autistic activists, families and scholars had been seeing for years: that autism research in the UK was shaped by normative-defined priorities, that resources clustered around biomedical funding, and that the aims of autism research were removed from what mattered in autistic lives.
This #DisabilityHistoryMonth seems like a good time to revisit it; how it unsettled norms. The report did not claim neutrality. Rather it called out funders, researchers, institutions and assumptions that had shaped the field. Naming these made the research hierarchies more visible. This visibility helped open space for autistic-led and co-produced research, even if it still unevenly and patchily present.
There were limitations, of course. The report still spoke from within the academic university-based structures that can still reproduce the very dynamics it sought to challenge. Perhaps, you might also argue, its framing was not radical enough. Yet historically it mattered. It gave practitioners, funders and policymakers a platform that legitimised autistic demands for participatory practice at a national scale. It also helped seed the current expectation that autism research must involve autistic people not as targets or consultees but as partners whose lived expertise is central.
Perhaps the most enduring legacy so far is in the way it helped shift the centre of knowledge production. It contributed to a (maybe too) slow reorientation where autistic people could increasingly place themselves as the measure of knowledge about autism. It helped prepare the ground for community-led research collectives, lived experience advisory groups, participatory design in education research, and perhaps even a more critical engagements with the politics of autism science.
Pellicano, L., Dinsmore, A., & Charman, T. (2013)
A Future Made Together: Shaping autism research in the UK.
Post by Brian