Narratives of transformation: Family discourse, autism and trajectories of hope

This article explores the role of personal life narrative as a self-shaping transformative process in the day-to-day family lives of 17 US children diagnosed with autism. Employing ethnographic video-and audio-taped data of naturalistic family interaction, the article illumines how family members employ conversational narrative in co-creating, with children, possible imagined futures, aspirations, and goals. Despite uncertain futures and unknown clinical outcomes, children are encouraged to engage in self-reflexive narrative practices that portray them in a hopeful yet realistic light. By exploring moment-by-moment details of talk-in-interaction in the lives of children diagnosed with autism, the article contributes to scholarship on how children’s experiences and self-conceptions pertaining to well-being, disability, and difference are configured and shaped via discursive practices carried out within the family sphere. Children with autism display socio-communicative difficulties that call attention to, ...