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生活记忆为标志的环境中，作为一个有医学社会障碍的人意味着什么？这是一个中心问题，激发了我对研究北方尔爱尔兰贝尔法斯特自闭症的多重生活经历的兴趣。我希望扩展我之前关于自闭症患者的移情和沟通的研究，作为日常社交的两个典型方面，以及被认为在被诊断患有这种疾病的人中受损的社交能力，在一个非自闭症患者之间的移情和沟通也很容易崩溃的城市。在贝尔法斯特，社会经济不平等、城市隔离、宗派主义、定期爆发的国内暴力以及种族和政治冲突的物质和情感遗产等相互交织的地方性形式。关注这些地方性的挑战如何与自闭症患者的人格感和归属感进行共情交流，作为被污名化的神经多样性主体，有可能改变对自闭症的现有理解，作为一种心理状况，其不可减少的社会维度必然会受到当地社会动态的影响。自反式地，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和解决冲突实践的政治见解。

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.