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The trouble with brain imaging: Hope, uncertainty and ambivalence in the neuroscience of autism

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Abstract

This article is about ambivalent dynamics of hope and uncertainty within neurobiological autism research. While much literature has commented on the positive hopes and expectations that surround technoscientific projects, fewer have focused on less promissory visions – and, in particular, on the presence of uncertainty and ambiguity among working scientists. This article shows how autism neuroscientists actually talk about their research in ambivalent, entangled registers of both promising hope and deflated uncertainty. The article locates the dynamic between these in an ‘intermediate terrain’ of autism research – in which autism is both ‘present’ as an epidemiological and social force, but also ‘ambiguous’ as a (not yet) well-defined clinical and scientific object. It argues that neuroscientists work through this terrain by drawing not only on a discourse of unalloyed hope and promise, but by entangling their research within a more complex register of ‘structured ambivalence’, which includes languages of uncertainty, deflation and low expectation. As well as showing the novelty of research within autism’s ‘intermediate terrain’, this adds to a growing literature on the ‘sociology of low expectations’, and analyses the presence of such feelings among scientific researchers particularly.

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Notes

  1. The interviews from which the empirical basis of this article draws ultimately produced around 26 hours of interview, which I partially transcribed into a corpus of 80 000 words, and which I coded as I proceeded, with affiliations (albeit progressively loose ones) to the methods of grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006), and the qualitative software, NVivo 8 (QSR International Pty Ltd., 2008).

  2. To help orient the reader, I will attach signifiers to interview-extracts that follow. Although I do not rely heavily on these distinctions, note that the first letter of each connotes the interviewee’s relative position: ‘P’ for PhD student; ‘R’ for researcher (typically someone not long out of their PhD, such as a postdoctoral researcher); ‘L’ for lecturer (or someone in a more advanced, usually permanent position); ‘SS’ for a senior scientist (such as a professor or principal investigator); and ‘3S’ for a member of a third-sector organisation (such as an autism-related charity). Note that these distinctions are not always hard and fast, and should not be over-interpreted.

  3. cf. Pickersgill (2011b, p. 81) where, strikingly, and in the midst of a very similar discussion, a researcher imagined psychopathy being as specifically diagnosable from anti-social behaviour as an ulcer is from general stomach ache. These parallels are unfortunately beyond the scope of the current discussion, but see Gross (2011) for a consideration of the ways in which metaphors work to bring neurological objects into particular kinds of understanding.

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Fitzgerald, D. The trouble with brain imaging: Hope, uncertainty and ambivalence in the neuroscience of autism. BioSocieties 9, 241–261 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2014.15

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