Empathy on the peace lines: autism and belonging in a socially divided city

在一个以持续的社会分裂和冲突的鲜活记忆为标志的环境中，作为一个患有医疗社会障碍的人意味着什么？这是一个核心问题，激发了我对北爱尔兰贝尔法斯特多种自闭症生活经历的研究兴趣。我希望扩展我之前关于自闭症患者共情和沟通谈判的工作，这两个方面都是日常社交的典范，准确地说，在一个非自闭症患者之间的共情和沟通也很容易崩溃的城市里，被诊断为患有自闭症的人的社交能力被认为是受损的。在贝尔法斯特，社会经济不平等、城市隔离、宗派主义、周期性的国内暴力以及种族和政治冲突的物质和情感遗产产生了相互交织的、地方性的交替形式。关注这些同理心交流方面的本地挑战如何与自闭症患者的人格和归属感交织在一起，作为被污名化的神经多样性学科，可能会改变对自闭症的现有理解，因为自闭症是一种心理疾病，其不可消除的社会维度必然会受到当地社会动态的影响。本能地，将自闭症患者置于冲突后背景下交叉关系话语的分析中，可能会动摇当前对建设和平政治和冲突解决做法的看法。

What does it mean to be a person with medicalised social impairments in an environment marked by ongoing socialdivision and a living memory of conflict? This is the central question animating my interest in researching the multiplyenacted lived experiences of autism in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I hope to extend my previous work on autists'negotiations of empathy and communication, as both paradigmatic aspects of everyday sociality, and precisely the socialcapacities that are thought to be impaired in people diagnosed with the condition, in a city where empathy andcommunication among non-autists is also vulnerable to breakdown. Intersecting, endemic forms of alterity in Belfastemerge from socioeconomic inequality, urban segregation, sectarianism, periodic bouts of civil violence, and the materialand affective legacies of ethnic and political conflict. An attention to how these local challenges to empathiccommunicating intertwine with autists' sense of personhood and belonging as stigmatized neurodiverse subjects haspotential to alter existing understandings of autism, as a psychological condition whose irreducibly social dimension willnecessarily be affected by local social dynamics. Reflexively, situating autists in an analysis of intersecting relationaldiscourses in a post-conflict context could shake up current insights about the politics of peacebuilding and conflictresolution practices.