Trans-exclusionary radical feminists challenge transgender people (specifically women) from within a claimed feminist struggle. They exclude transgender women and instead claim they are men colonising women’s spaces. I present a conversation analytic and analytical membership categorisation case study of a national radio interview in which the spokesperson for a trans-exclusionary feminist political group debates with the host on the nature of trans women and their exclusion from women’s spaces. I show how the interviewee accomplishes trans exclusion in talk,, often without making explicit claims about trans women, by constructing both biologically essentialist and experiential distinctions between trans and cis women, constructing trans women as participants in patriarchal oppression, and by problematising a claimed redefinition of the category woman being enacted by trans women. This analysis highlights how transphobic (and specifically transmisogynistic) attitudes are accomplished in social interaction through sequential action and categorial inferences.

Touch is an important component of many social experiences for many people. Autistic children commonly avoid social touch more than non-autistic peers. It is generally thought that this is due to autistic individuals experiencing hyper- or hyposensitivity of touch. While this is undoubtedly the case at least some of the time, studies of touch and autism have often involved decontextualised experimental settings or post-hoc reports on touch by autistic people or their common social interactants (i.e., parents). As such, there is very little research that looks at social touch in interactions involving autistic people and studies how it naturally occurs and how it is managed in the moment. Using multimodal Conversation Analysis, I analyse a collection of cases of social touch in the form of parents' cuddles or embraces with their autistic children. I demonstrate here what these cuddles can look like, how they can unfold over time with both autistic children and their parents mutually participate in building intimate sensorial moments. I also show more problematic moments where the child resists, abandons, or misunderstands a cuddle from their parent (or attempt to secure one) demonstrating that, in these cases, the trouble for the autistic children was not touch sensitivity but the prioritisation of courses of action that social touch would impede. As such the children display that the social touch is avoided or negatively evaluated due to its social nature, not its physical/sensational one. In demonstrating this I argue that not everything that might look like a sign of sensory difference is one.

Directive trajectories are common in parent–child talk as parents attempt to engage their children in household activities. Previous research on families with autistic children has reported that parents have difficulty engaging their children in household activities. The current study analyses the strategies a parent utilizes in negotiating an activity contract with their autistic child. The analyses show that the parent negotiates stances towards autonomy, category-membership-tied activities and social obligations, as well as used embodied conduct. The analyses also show how the child is sensitive to these strategies and actively participates in the directive trajectory. The findings show that both parent and child are active co-constructors of the social relationship in directive trajectories and that the child can strategically counter the variety of directive resources the parent uses.

Purpose: This article reconceptualizes theory of mind (ToM) and perspective-taking as a practical accomplishment in social interaction, and analyzes how, and when, autistic children produce explanations of their behavior in ways that address how other people do, or may, understand it. Method: Three families with autistic children collected video recordings of themselves interacting at home. From 5 hours of video, a collection of 45 instances of accounts produced by autistic children was made, transcribed, and subjected to conversation analysis. Results: Accounts occurred in both initiating and responsive turns. Accounts produced in initiating turns addressed the potential characterizations of this and themselves their interlocutors might make. Their accounts in second position addressed actual characterizations in interlocutors’ preceding turns. As well, two of the children produced accounts which constructed their behavior as the result of internal causes. Discussion and conclusion: These analyses demonstrate the children’s practical reasoning about how other people observe, recognize, and understand their behavior. Despite autism being linked to difficulties with ToM and perspective-taking, these autistic children manage perspective-taking through the provision of accounts in multiple sequential positions. These findings challenge the emphasis on ToM deficit based explanations of autism, while suggesting a stronger research focus on local, situated perspective-taking in social interaction.

<p><b>In psychological research, autistic people are generally characterised as possessing disordered social cognition and embodiment in comparison to non-autistic people. </b></p> <p>Specifically, a deficit in Theory of Mind (the capacity to think about other people’s mental states in order to understand and predict their behaviour) and altered tactile sensation have been proposed as some significant psychological differences present in autism. Autistic people are characterised as experiencing social interactional difficulties that impact social-emotional reciprocity. Examples of such impact include struggling to approach others to interact or to make personal or relevant contributions to an interaction.</p> <p>While there is a substantial literature on the cognitive properties of autistic individuals compared to non-autistic individuals and how these impact social psychological phenomena, there is considerably less research that analyses autistic people in their own right as social agents in naturally-occurring, everyday settings. As well, there is a challenge to the ideology behind deficit-oriented frameworks of autism in the form of the neurodiversity movement. This thesis draws on ethnomethodology, discursive psychology, and conversation analysis to contribute to both the naturalistic study of autistic people in social interaction and the development of positive, competence-oriented, and ecological approaches to autism. This will be achieved by analysing the social action, as produced in talk and with the body, of autistic children in interaction with their family members in their homes. </p> <p>Ten hours of video recordings were collected in the homes of four volunteer families with at least one autistic child member. Recordings were made by the families themselves of the mundane domestic activities they engaged in, including episodes of cooking and mealtimes, members playing together, preparing for school, and discussing the day’s activities. After detailed transcription, instances of the children providing accounts for their own behaviour and embraces (or resistance to them) were collected for and became the focus of detailed analysis. An extended sequence constituting a common parenting activity (directing a child to do something) was also selected. This research takes the domains of Theory of Mind and tactile sensation that are prominent within psychological research on autism and treats them as social interactional accomplishments. </p> <p>The first empirical chapter examines how children accounted for their own behaviour. </p> <p>It found that the children’s accounts were oriented toward the displayed expectancies and characterisations of the child and their conduct either in responding to first pair parts (e.g., resisting suggestions with an embedded presumption of the child’s knowledge), or in launching their own first action (e.g., requesting more food). These accounts constitute concern for how the children’s interactants could, or do, treat them in response to their behaviour, accomplishing Theory of Mind embedded in their everyday action.</p> <p>With respect to tactile sensation, the second empirical chapter analyses embraces. </p> <p>Embraces occurred within and between a variety of other activities. Analyses showed how both children and parents initiated embraces and many were accomplished as non-problematic by the children. Participants arranged their bodies such that the embrace was coordinated with the talk and ongoing action, and utilised both verbal and embodied resources to initiate and terminate. Children prioritised their ongoing actions, treating some embraces or embrace initiations as interruptive by avoiding, escaping or otherwise misaligning with them. </p> <p>The third empirical chapter demonstrates how one family’s extended sequence of action directing their child to use the bathroom before bedtime was comprised of a variety of different relational activities. In the process of managing the larger project of the directive, parent and child negotiated complex elements of their relationship including issues of power and responsibility, shared knowledge and experiences, and expectations of group membership. </p> <p>This thesis offers a critical perspective on the conceptualisation of autism in psychology. It grounds this alternative view of autism based on an empirical analysis of how the autistic children and their family members in the interactions analysed manage complex social psychological matters in the production of their social action. It expands upon discursive psychological research on the accomplishment of social cognition as action produced within talk-in-interaction. It also exemplifies a direction a neurodiversity-sensitive psychology of social action could take and identifies ways that this can be further developed.</p>