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

What does it mean to be a person with medicalised social impairments in an environment marked by ongoing social
division and a living memory of conflict? This is the central question animating my interest in researching the multiply
enacted 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 social
capacities that are thought to be impaired in people diagnosed with the condition, in a city where empathy and
communication among non-autists is also vulnerable to breakdown. Intersecting, endemic forms of alterity in Belfast
emerge from socioeconomic inequality, urban segregation, sectarianism, periodic bouts of civil violence, and the material
and affective legacies of ethnic and political conflict. An attention to how these local challenges to empathic
communicating intertwine with autists' sense of personhood and belonging as stigmatized neurodiverse subjects has
potential to alter existing understandings of autism, as a psychological condition whose irreducibly social dimension will
necessarily be affected by local social dynamics. Reflexively, situating autists in an analysis of intersecting relational
discourses in a post-conflict context could shake up current insights about the politics of peacebuilding and conflict
resolution practices.