Radu Nedescu
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Doctoral Project: A phenomenological investigation of autistic identities.
Abstract date:
9/15/26
My affiliation:
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest
This doctoral project consists of a phenomenological investigation of autistic identities as tacitly and explicitly experienced by those autistic people that are able, in one way or another, to express their lived experience. To access such experiences, I use autobiographical data by autistics and academic literature that describes and analyzes such experiences.
I refer to autistic identities, instead of autistic identity, because, given that autism is a spectrum, one cannot legitimately posit the existence of individuals that share sufficient traits to fit into an autistic identity. The wideness of the autism spectrum does not hinder my research, it just orients it towards a comparison between multiple autistic identity types.
By a phenomenological investigation, I mean a description and analysis of lived experience through the tools of the 20th century philosophical tradition of phenomenology. To analyze these lived
experiences, I use late Edmund Husserl’s concept of affection and late Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh. By identities, I mean those sets of tacit and explicit mental processes that constitute one’s self-perception (a) as a perceiver (minimal self), (b) as an embodied occurrence (proprioceptive self), (c) as shaped by interactions with others (inter-subjective self) and (d) as a person with their own preferences, goals, and self-interpretation (narrative self).
My project investigates the aforementioned to find the key traits that form, when put together, some of those manners of self-perception that set autistics apart from neurotypicals. By doing so, my project fills the following relevant gaps in the current phenomenological literature on autism: (a) the scarcity of analyses of autistic narrative identities, (b) the scarcity of meta-reviews of the phenomenological literature on autism, and (c) the lack of comprehensive accounts of autistic identities in general.
My project contributes simultaneously to the conceptual articulation of autistic subjectivity and to the neurodiversity movement by providing an account of the autistic manner(s) of being-in-the-world and by doing so without erasing the plurality of autistic perspectives and without adhering to the neuro-normative paradigm, namely, to the paradigm that posits the existence of unhealthy manners of being.
As an autistic researcher, this project leads also to self discovery.
Doctoral Project:
A phenomenological investigation of autistic identities.
Abstract date:
9/15/26
My affiliation:
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest
This doctoral project consists of a phenomenological investigation of autistic identities as tacitly and explicitly experienced by those autistic people that are able, in one way or another, to express their lived experience. To access such experiences, I use autobiographical data by autistics and academic literature that describes and analyzes such experiences.
I refer to autistic identities, instead of autistic identity, because, given that autism is a spectrum, one cannot legitimately posit the existence of individuals that share sufficient traits to fit into an autistic identity. The wideness of the autism spectrum does not hinder my research, it just orients it towards a comparison between multiple autistic identity types.
By a phenomenological investigation, I mean a description and analysis of lived experience through the tools of the 20th century philosophical tradition of phenomenology. To analyze these lived
experiences, I use late Edmund Husserl’s concept of affection and late Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh. By identities, I mean those sets of tacit and explicit mental processes that constitute one’s self-perception (a) as a perceiver (minimal self), (b) as an embodied occurrence (proprioceptive self), (c) as shaped by interactions with others (inter-subjective self) and (d) as a person with their own preferences, goals, and self-interpretation (narrative self).
My project investigates the aforementioned to find the key traits that form, when put together, some of those manners of self-perception that set autistics apart from neurotypicals. By doing so, my project fills the following relevant gaps in the current phenomenological literature on autism: (a) the scarcity of analyses of autistic narrative identities, (b) the scarcity of meta-reviews of the phenomenological literature on autism, and (c) the lack of comprehensive accounts of autistic identities in general.
My project contributes simultaneously to the conceptual articulation of autistic subjectivity and to the neurodiversity movement by providing an account of the autistic manner(s) of being-in-the-world and by doing so without erasing the plurality of autistic perspectives and without adhering to the neuro-normative paradigm, namely, to the paradigm that posits the existence of unhealthy manners of being.
As an autistic researcher, this project leads also to self discovery.