Completing my anthropology honors thesis, Snapshots of Self: Exploring autistic Seattle-based young-adults experience with identity and Friendships through participatory photography, was the first time I felt that I truly saw myself as a researcher and represented within a research project. Early in my academic journey, research was often presented to me as something that required a distancing from one’s own lived experience to create a sense of objectivity within the work. Although scholars of many fields beyond the social sciences are now challenge this notion, anthropologists have long critiqued it. My outstanding faculty advisors, Dr. Marieke van Eijk and Dr. Heather Clark, encouraged me to intentionally incorporate my lived experiences as an autistic woman of color to develop relevant research questions and accessible research methodology. 

​

I found being autistic myself particularly shaped how I approached the topic friendship in my project compared to how friendship is approached in prior research. Much of the existing literature frames autistic individual’s friendships as deviations from a ‘normal’ non-autistic standard, a deficit-based framing that both limits the type of data collected but also how it is interpreted. In my thesis research, I decided to move beyond this deficit-based framing and instead invited participants to define friendship on their own terms. This meant that when asking participants about friendship, I didn’t outline what friendship is or looks like but instead provided them the space to do this for themselves in their repones. One aspect of friendship I was particularly interested in exploring were the physical environments that supported individuals in making new friends or sustaining existing relationship; something that the non-traditional research methodology I selected helped provide a wealth of information on that in many instances would not be captured. 

​

Using participatory photography, which I affectionately refer to as photo diaries, allowed participants to accessibly document the complexity of their daily lives by capturing nuances that traditional interviews often miss. Photographs capture the unique sensory environments that folks interact with and directly impact autistic individual’s daily experiences. I still remember viewing the first set of photos with my advisors and pointing out sensory details that stood out to me immediately but individuals without sensory sensitivities were less attuned to. Being an autistic researcher doing research with autistic individuals fundamentally shifted my post-graduate aspirations. It revealed how deeply I care about working within the autistic community and how urgently this field needs autistic scholars guiding research agendas. Realizing that my perspective is not only important but truly necessary to this research was transformative for me both in terms of my academic confidence and sense of individual purpose.