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

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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.