The Essentialising Use of ‘Ethnicity’, ‘Race’, and ‘Culture’ As Constructs of Difference in Autism Research

Evidence indicates that ethnically and racially minoritised groups are significantly less likely than the majority to receive an autism diagnosis, both in the United States and in Europe. This has sparked a surge of interest in how cultural factors influence these disparities. However, despite this growing interest, the concept of ‘culture’ remains significantly underdeveloped in autism research, leading to selective and limited explanations of its impact. In this presentation, based on a narrative review, I will discuss how autism research tends to hyper accentuate or hyper ‘visibilise’ ethnicity and race as proxies for ‘differences’. This is particularly true in studies adhering to a medical model of disability, which attribute difficulties in accurate autism identification and diagnosis to minoritised groups’ supposedly different cultural and religious beliefs about mental health and neurodevelopmental disorders. This scholarship not only perpetuates cultural essentialist notions of ethnicity and race but also conflates different ethnic, racial, and nation-state or migration categories. I will further discuss how, conversely, ethnicity and race are nearly ‘invisibilised’ in research following the social model of disability, which explores autism as a constructed and negotiated culture and identity. Consequently, little is known about how autism is initially shaped in relation to ethnicity and race; how we collectively imagine autistic people and how ethnically or racially diverse our images are. I will finally show how adopting a broader definition of ‘culture’ that pays attention to these cultural categorisations, shared narratives, identities and symbolic boundaries through processes of meaning-making, will enable us to better understand how the observed disparities in autism diagnosis rates also stem from how autism is often constructed as white and middle-class, which makes minoritised groups less able to identify as autistic, and more pertinently, less likely to be identified as such by healthcare providers.