The communicative construction of marginal social spheres: fragile interaction with people who suffer from autism spectrum disorders

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ronald Hitzler
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Sociological Theory
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 328202917

We understand borders of sociality, first, as being constituted by people labeling certain other humans in a particular manner as marginal. Second, we define borders of sociality through specific localities, that is, when these particular humans can preferably be found at certain places or sites.To be more precise, we focus on humans with severe developmental disorders in the autism-spectrum. Exemplary, we investigate when and how communication becomes questionable and how the non-communicative other is constructed in the case of humans with severe autistic disorders. In this research, humans capable of what is commonly understood as communication meet others, whose communicative performance often raises a doubt among the former about whether the latter are like them, perceive the world in a similar way and have similar needs. Precisely, these uncertainties resulting from irritations of communicative expectations turn the counterpart into a stranger or strange creature and expose the dealing with him as a border of sociality. This contact inevitably includes, that the involved actors (physicians, therapists and nursing staff), just as relatives and members, make acting in situations of therapy, nursing and care plausible, both for themselves and third parties - i.e. to suggest intended communication and to expect meaning-appropriate reactions of the other person.On the whole, we seek to reconstruct the ways how a) doubts about the happening of communication are constituted, b) actors handle and overcome these doubts, c) problems related to the communication with non-communicatable labeled other people are solved, and d) these solutions are made plausible and thus how secondary sociality or normality is constructed.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Andreas Bender; Professor Dr. Niels Birbaumer
• Co-Investigator: Bernd Langhorst