In a new open-access paper in the Journal of Community Psychology, autistic scholar Monique Botha argues that the discipline’s dominant frameworks have failed to account for the social realities and ethical obligations of studying autism and have often caused harm in the name of objectivity.
Rather than call for more inclusive diagnostics or improved interventions, Botha questions how knowledge is produced in the first place.
Drawing on critical realism and community psychology, Botha outlines a model of research that is participatory, justice-oriented, and accountable to those it studies. She challenges the dominance of positivist and constructivist traditions, arguing that neither is sufficient for understanding autism as a complex, socially embedded phenomenon. Instead, she offers critical realism as a philosophical foundation for doing science with people, not on them.
Botha explains that critical realism offers a model in which members of marginalized communities co-create science, writing:
“This itself provides a route of social action to a more equitable science, because it means addressing the racist, homophobic, sexist, and ableist science and psychology that has produced knowledge. Further, given that knowledge is embedded, it then only makes sense to heavily involve members of impacted communities throughout all stages of research processes—something that is advocated for in autism research.”
At the heart of her critique is the assertion that mainstream psychology has reduced autism to an object of measurement, an isolated “disorder” to be studied from afar. As she writes, positivist science privileges detachment and claims of neutrality, yet routinely excludes autistic people as “too close” to the subject to be credible informants. This stance, she argues, has legitimized a century of reductive, essentialist, and sometimes violent research practices.
Botha, who is herself autistic, situates this critique within a broader reckoning over how mental health disciplines have long marginalized the very people they claim to serve. From the objectifying lens of positivist research to the false neutrality of constructivist models, she contends that dominant approaches in autism science have pathologized difference while failing to grapple with the social conditions that produce suffering and the power dynamics that sustain them.
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