The small team of researchers, most of whom are autistic, and which became the Independent Autism Research Group, was originally set up to undertake research into support for autistic students. We began by investigating support for autistic students at university in the UK with a summary of our final report being published in the Journal of Further and Higher Education. The project then moved on to consider support for students in college with a report of our work being published in Good Autism Practice. Members of the team also contributed to the development of a framework for inclusive autism research (research that is both emancipatory and participatory) which you can read about in our Disability & Society article. These articles and others are accessible from the ‘Publications’ page.
Subsequent work has covered areas as diverse as operational policing, so-called ‘autistic traits’, terrorism, and neurodiversity.
Our latest research is a systematic review of priorities for autism research. We set ourselves the objective to develop a set of emancipatory autism research foci, prioritised by members of the autism community, with the potential to benefit autistic people. Only three studies have developed autism research priority sets to date (UK - Pellicano, Dinsmore & Charman, 2014; UK - Warner, Cooper & Cusack, 2019 for Autistica; US - Frazier et al., 2018 for Autism Speaks). All three evidenced a clear disparity between what autism research funding is spent on and the priorities identified by the majority of their participants - e.g., 44% of total UK autism research funding in 2016 was spent on animal studies (genetics) (Warner, Cooper & Cusack, 2019) rather than research to benefit the lived experience of autistic people - and concluded that future priorities should focus on matters that make a difference to ‘people’s day-to-day lives’. A report on our review of autism research priorities is available on the Canadian Journal of Educational and Social Studies website.