Who Needs to (un)know? on the Generative Possibilities of Ignorance for Autistic Futures

This article advances an (anti)agenda that would center unknowing as a necessary tool to remake autism. While much of the literature on the social study of ignorance describes its corrosive effects for democracy or how ignorance fuels epistemic injustice, I argue that some harms committed against autistic people have come from well-meaning attempts to know. A newly invigorated "critical" autism studies could foreground a project of ignorance to catalogue the varieties of unknowing that can recenter and remake autism. This does not entail simply supplanting "expert" knowledge with "non-expert" knowledge from the purified perspective of situated, autistic knowers; rather it disrupts feel-good narratives in which any efforts to rescue subjugated knowledges are hailed as undeniably progressive, a practice in which autistic knowers can become ensnared. Unknowing autism can propel the generative possibilities of failure, and futures in which efforts to reproduce dominant ways of knowing are resisted.