My research explores the sociality of people with Asperger’s syndrome, who experience life-long difficulties in social interactions, yet in some domains of social life, are able to achieve very high levels of social coordination and personal independence.
My research therefore has both applied and theoretical applications. The applied question I explore is how the interactional ecologies of different settings, including the interactants, activities, and culture of such settings, extend or limit the possibilities for social coordination, in turn affecting how the socially disabling aspects of an Asperger’s diagnosis are realised. For this reason my unit of analysis is not the individual, but rather the social relationships people with Asperger’s syndrome share with family members and friends.
This connects with the theoretical question I explore. In contrast to the predominantly cognitive approach to perspective-taking used in research on autism, which sees perspective-taking as an individual skill, my research explores perspective-taking as an interactional accomplishment by (a) examining perspective-taking from both sides of the social relation (i.e. including the perspectives of people without an Asperger’s diagnosis), and (b) exploring how levels of intersubjectivity affect shared understanding, and vice versa, in everyday natural interactions.
My research is supervised by Dr. Alex Gillespie, Associate Professor of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics. My doctorate is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Heasman, Brett and Reader, Tom W. (2015) What can acute medicine learn from qualitative methods? Current Opinion in Critical Care, 21 (5). pp. 460-466
A. Gillespie, K. Corti, S. Evans, & B. Heasman (2016). Imagining the Self through Creative Technologies. In T. Zittoun & V. Glaveanu (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Imagination and Culture (pp. XX-XX). Oxford: Oxford University Press.