Mat Thompson

Department, Institution: Psychosocial Studies, BBK
UBEL Pathway: Gender and Sexuality
Supervisor: Dr. Margarita Aragon (principal) and Prof. Chandak Sengoopta (secondary)
About Me

I hold an MSc in Gender (Sexuality) from LSE and a BA in American Studies and English from the University of Nottingham. I take an interdisciplinary approach to my research that incorporates methodologies from both the social and political sciences as well as the arts and humanities. I have worked in frontline service roles for a number of years and am dedicated to engaging and building communities through my work, centring accessibility within academic and social research.

My Research

Long histories of pathologisation have created narrow definitions of what it means to be autistic, thus limiting autistic people’s ability to articulate their own being. My research takes an interdisciplinary approach to interrogate the construction of autistic subjective and ontology within historical and contemporary clinical discourses of disability and neurology. I propose to use a unique theoretical framework informed by queer, trans, Black, decolonial, and disabled critiques to examine these narratives and to demonstrate the mechanisms of power through which autistic individuals are subjected and made ontological. My contribution to the literature rests on the assertion that, in contradiction to dominant discourses, autistic people construct new ways of being outside of normativity though art, performance, writing, and community building that resist subjectivising processes. My primary research question is: what is the epistemological significance of understanding autistic ontology through models of Black and trans subjectivities? I am interested in the new ontologies that might emerge from this research and how we may confer the power to determine subjectivity unto autistic people themselves.

Impact of My Research

This makes space for autistic existence beyond neurology; opens new pathways for autistic ontologies to be formed; and disentangles, without disconnecting, autism from its constructive origins. In applying a psychosocial framework to an historical and cultural context, I hope that this analysis will yield challenging and constructive understandings of autistic existence within a historical context of power and pathologisation that offer new epistemologies for practice and scholarship. I intend for this work to challenge existing understandings of autism as an a priori and universally conceivable phenomenon by highlighting the complexity and nuance of autistic subjective construction within medical and social contexts and discourses across an historical period.

Beyond the academy, I hope my research will be useful to a broad range of communities. For autistic individuals themselves, I hope that this work demonstrates the power of their perspectives and the importance their voices have in determining new definitions of autistic existence, and that they may find identity and empowerment in my work.