Innocent Machines

Abstract

Drawing on school-based ethnography in classrooms serving students with Asperger’s syndrome and related autism spectrum conditions in a district on the East Coast of the United States, this chapter analyzes how the meanings of these conditions are defined, negotiated, and deployed in consequential ways in contexts of everyday practice. The chapter begins by tracing schisms between “developmental disability” and “mental illness.” Through what Ian Hacking calls a “looping effect of human kinds,” students diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and related developmental disabilities come to exemplify a form of “brainhood,” a cerebral identity associated with replicable, quantified, and high-tech brain science. This schema is contrasted with local understandings of students classified with emotional or behavioral disturbance as changeable, morally culpable, and interpersonally engaged—thus exemplifying theories of mental illness as rooted in fluid brain chemistry and family dysfunction. The association of students with Asperger’s syndrome with a brain science seen as value-producing, mechanistic, and estranged from sociality wins them both a protected space and scarce material resources; however, this vision of Asperger’s students as “innocent machines” cannot effectively conceptualize the moral agency of their robustly social lives.