勤労中高年ASD者のオートエスノグラフィー

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Abstract

This paper shows some of the remarks of the middle and old-aged ASD（Autism Spectrum Disorders）workers attending the meetings of Handai（Osaka University） ASD Cafe. The Cafe, which follows the style of Science Cafe, is planned and presided over by me with the support of several professors at Osaka University United Graduate School of Child Development and Graduate School of Language and Culture. The purposes I try to achieve through the project are to promote mutual understanding among the participants either with or without ASD, and to make open to the public the predicaments of the middle and old-aged people with ASD, who manage to work without sufficient support at their workplace. In this paper, I employ an autoethnographic method to analyze and consider the participants’ remarks picked up from some of the meetings of the Cafe. Two of the many problems that ASD studies today have are that most of the studies tend to exclusively focus on children or younger people, and that the media such as TV programs, even when they cover middle-aged people, focus attention on only a few prominent persons with ASD, who, for example, confess having a very serious condition of hypersensibility so that they even have difficulty to live. Unlike those especially famous people, ordinary citizens with ASD, including me, don’t have the means to ask for support for their comparatively milder condition of hypersensibility or seemingly less serious communication troubles. I once wrote an ethnography of a participant of our Cafe with ASD, but throughout my research career I have not emphasized or taken advantage of having ASD myself, although our ASD cafes have been held as many as twenty times for the last three years. So I decided to write about how both the participants and I feel, when faced with communication problems with non-autistic people in everyday lives through autoethnography. I insist that it is both people with severe physical symptoms of ASD and people like us who have different viewpoints and unique ways of communicating due to ASD who need public or private support.

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