Episode 81 - Jessica Aiston & Eltham Hill School students on the language of neurodiversity

[Music] Welcome to Lexis, the podcast all about language and linguistics. I'm Lisa Casey and Jackie Glancy. I'm Radarana and I'm Dank Leighton. [Music] Okay, we're joined on this special student take over episode of Lexis, which is about the language of and around neurodiversity by Dr Jessica Aston, who is a postdoctoral research assistant in linguistics at Queen Mary University of London and who previously appeared on episode 50. One of our best episodes, I think, and certainly most listen to runs talking about critical discourse studies. So welcome Jess, thanks for joining us. And we're also joined on this episode by two A-level students from Elton Hill School, South London, Freya and Miles, who will basically be doing my job but better doing the interviewing today. So I'm going to let Freya and Miles introduce themselves and take it away. So over to you. Hi, I'm Freya and as an English student studying English language at A-level, I found a lot of interest in studying language and specifically within looking at identity and external factors which impact on our language. However, within that, I always felt that a key part of my own identity being my neurodiversity was left uncovered. And I think this is a pattern that I've noticed not only across this subject to many others but generally in society. As a neurodiverse person, I think it's really important that our community needs to be given space to decide how we wish to be defined. And I found across history that and even in modern society, this hasn't been given to us. And I think hopefully for this podcast episode, hope to debunk the languages around neurodiverse people and share languages prepared by this community and also individuals themselves. Hi, I'm Miles and my own interest in this topic kind of stems from a lot of consumption of kind of online commentary about how certain times to describe like mental health in general, but specifically autism, for example, can become like offensive or insensitive. And I think it's also interesting to see how people kind of outside of the autistic community describes people that are a part of it and how these descriptions can have more like real world effects on how autistic people are perceived. And I think that it's important to discuss this sort of thing because it's not just kind of theoretical. It's more about the kind of real world impact and how the language we use to describe, you know, autistic people can have a real effect on the type of support that they receive. So I think by talking about this topic, we kind of just want to bring attention to the way language can subconsciously oppress those that might not fit into society's definition of what's seen as typical and how we can make our language as a whole more equal. Lovely to hear from you both, and it's great to see people being so passionate about language use. Yes, so a lot of what we're going to talk about today is related to the power of language. And as we know, language a very direct power within our society and a lot of what it's used to is to describe and label people and I think the implications of those labels and descriptions have a big ripple effect. So can we ask about sort of terminology and what we mean as terms of neurodiversity to be neurodiverse or to identify as neurodivergent and how like we use them and if we're using them correctly. Yeah, so we use terms like neurodiversity, neurodivergence, neurotypical. People might not know what they mean, so happy to explain what they are. So neurodivergence means different from the neurological norm or the neurotypical. It's most often invoked in relation to autism, ADHD, but also encompasses dyslexia, dyspraxia, Tourette's. You might also see some people use neurodivergence to also encompass mental health conditions like OCD or bipolar, but most often it's used to describe lifelong neurological conditions like autism and ADHD as I said. Neurotypical is usually used to mean somebody who does not have any of these conditions, sort of the equivalent of cisgender or heterosexual. When we talk about neurodiversity, it's to acknowledge that there is great neurological variation in the population in terms of cognition, how we process emotions, how we process senses, how we communicate. This is in contrast to the position that there is a singular normal brain against which everything else is considered to be deficient. So we're acknowledging that there's great diversity rather than saying there's one correct brain and everything else is incorrect. The term neurodiversity, it's most often attributed to Judy Singer in the late 90s. However, the concept is much older than 1999 and it was developed collectively by the autistic advocacy movement. Obviously, these terms are used to describe people but also conditions and kind of states of being. So how careful do we all need to be about how we use these kind of types of labels? What different factors are at work when we use them? Yeah, it is very important to use these labels. The neurodiversity movement came about from the autism advocacy movement and it's about rejecting deficit approaches which position autism as a disorder or epithology. Instead, neurodiversity approaches and using neurodiversity frameworks and language is about recognising that everybody's brain is different and but they're all different and violent. A metaphor that some people use is that some people run on Linux, some people run on Mac, some people run on Windows but you wouldn't say that Linux is a bad way of using a computer. It's just different to the Windows which is the most common one. And importantly, there's a lot of misconceptions around the neurodiversity movement and the neurodiversity paradigm. Some people say that neurodiversity denies that autistic and other neurodiversity people struggle or that it's always about presenting ADHD. It's a super power and but that's not what the neurodiversity movement is about. Instead, it's acknowledging that everybody has different ways of being, thinking and these are all worthy of support and respect. For example, people who are autistic might be very sensitive to sensory phenomena like light sounds, textures and have a strong need for predictability and routine and this affects how autistic people move through the world. So if you imagine going to the supermarket, supermarkets are not usually built with autistic needs in mind. You go there and there's fluorescent lighting, there's loud music, there's loud bleeps from the checkouts, they're very busy and crowded. You go there and they change the layout of the shop without any warning and you don't know where anything is. This can be quite stressful. In a deficit focused approach, you might think, okay, the autistic person needs to toughen up and deal with it or need to have some coping strategies to go to the supermarket. A neurodiversity approach would be thinking about how can we redesign supermarkets to help accommodate these different needs. So you might see some supermarkets now have quiet hours which don't have these loud music or maybe they'll have as many people into the shop. So it's about thinking how can we support these different ways of being. Another important point is that when we talk about neurodivergence neurotypical, it is an abstraction. It's not meant to imply a really sharp division between different people's brains or that there is no shared traits. So it's not about saying your neurotypical, that means you would never have any difficulties with maintaining attention, for example, or that a neurotypical person would never have a really intense interest. Instead, let me talk about neurotypical, it's about drawing attention to the fact that society in general is built for certain types of cognitive styles, certain neurologies. Society is not usually built around the needs of autistic people or people with ADHD. And so some activists like Nick Walker use terms like neurominearity, a neuromigurity to draw attention to that power dynamic. When I was first learning about this, I found it helpful to think of it like standard English. As in standard English, is not really a language that anybody speaks. Everybody uses some form of slang or some grammatical forms that are considered dee-end. But those who speak a language that's closest to standard English, they are privileged over those whose language is a bit further away from this standard. If that makes any sense. Yeah, I think we completely agree. I think as someone who is neurodiverous and does spend a lot of time in a neurotypical world, I definitely see crossovers and I think especially between our friendship and throughout our English language level, we do relate on these things, but we do have differences as well. I think it's really important to highlight that. And obviously acknowledge that in history, this hasn't always been the case. So for example, we've seen terms like Asperg Syndrome, which we now know is quite offensive and stems from a place of marginalising and silencing the voices of neurodiverse people or things like autism spectrum disorder, handicapped disabled, and there's so many others to name as well. And these across history and now in society have become quite pejorative. And so the kind of question is, what kind of youthfulness and cycle are we seeing with some of these terms and why this is happening and any trends and patterns we can see through that? Yeah, absolutely. The way that we talk about autism has changed significantly over the course of the century. The term autism was first named by Oigen Flyler in the 1910s when he was talking about schizophrenia, autism used to be considered a form of schizophrenia. Interestingly, the word autism itself comes from Greek autos, meaning self, and this idea of autistic people are very ego-centric, unaware of what's going on around them and unable to understand other people is still very pervasive. And it's not baked into the language of how we talk about autism. But the concept was then further developed by other psychiatrists in the 20th century, notably Hans Asperger and Leo Canner. And for a while, we had a distinction between classic autism or called Canner's Autism, early in file, the in-fantile autism versus Asperger syndrome, whereas the format was considered to be more severe and associated with speech delays, intellectual disabilities, and the latter considered to be more mild or high functioning. But then in the 2010s, these two diagnoses were merged, so we don't talk of classic autism and Asperger syndrome. We just talk about autism spectrum disorder as one thing. I don't have time to go into all of the reasons for why this merge happened, but partially it was because of evidence that Hans Asperger was collaborating with Nazis during the Holocaust. And a lot of people didn't like having a diagnosis named after that person. So autism spectrum disorder is the term that we use currently. However, it is a term that is contested. People don't like the term disorder there, because it implies that there's something wrong with them. And so there are efforts to rename it to autism spectrum condition or even just autism. So there's been lots of cycles about how we refer to autism. So autism to classic autism, Asperger syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autism spectrum condition to just autism. Some of these are because of clarity once we learn more things and also because of sensitivity. So what do the people in this community prefer to be called? Another cycle that's maybe also interesting to get into is around functioning labels. So I already mentioned that Asperger syndrome is also sometimes referred to as high functioning autism. So it used to be very common. I say it used to be, it still is. It still is very common to describe autistic people as being low functioning or high functioning. However, autistic advocates often criticise these terms because they describe people in terms of their productivity and relationship to capitalism, how productive are you at work? And it also focuses on the external presentation. For example, somebody might be considered to be high functioning autistic because they can hold down a job and live independently. But when they get home from their job, they are so sensory overloaded and burned out that they might struggle in their interpersonal relationships or might struggle to do self-care a household tasks. So is that really high functioning? And so this is a nice support to people who need it. Now the other hand, describing someone as low functioning dismisses that person's agency and abilities. So there was a push to replace these terms with support needs. So describing somebody as having high support needs or lower support needs. These put emphasis on what the people actually need rather than how people actually perform. But again, not everyone agrees with these terms. Indeed, what counts as low support needs or high support needs? And people's support needs might fluctuate as well. So we see all these cycles about trying to find a term that's accurate in a term that's sensitive and recognizes the agency of the people involved. In general, I think that it's important to go with the terms that people use for themselves. So if you're talking about an individual person, describing them as being low support needs, high support needs is quite vague. Instead, it's easier to just talk about what needs does this person have. Though I do concede it can be useful when you're talking in an abstract or general sense. For example, a lot of authors in research under-represents people with higher support needs. But if you're talking about an individual person, it's best to use the term that they themselves use or being more accurate or specific. Yeah, I think that's really interesting. And I think it's also important that we need to always emphasize kind of autonomy, because I think there's always this big idea that non-nurritable people in general, and especially autistic people, they've kind of seen as not being able to act for themselves or that they have some sort of deficiency. So I think it's really interesting and important to try and make sure that they're able to use kind of emphasize that they're still their own individual person. They're not badly blessed and neurotypical people. And I guess on the other hand, there's been some semantic reclamation around some of the terms that maybe lots of neurotypical people seem to find offensive to describe autistic people with, but autistic people themselves use it. So could you tell us about some of the terms that autistic people kind of use for themselves? So big one would be autism itself. Autism is often used as an insult or also referred to as a disorder, but a lot of autistic people are very proud of being autistic and say that being autistic is a big part of my identity. So I don't see it as insulting to call myself autistic. Another example of semantic reclamation comes from Asperger syndrome, which I was discussing before. While this was being used as a diagnosis, a lot of people referred to themselves as being an ASP. And this was a big point of pride and identity for a lot of people saying that yeah, ASP pride was a big thing. And so when Asperger syndrome was merged into autism's spectrum disorder, many people felt that they'd lost some important resource or lost some part of identity if they weren't able to call themselves that anymore. So those are some examples of semantic reclamation. We also have people cringing new terms to refer to themselves. So a relatively new one that's come up that you may have heard of is NeuroSpicy. So NeuroSpicy is often used as a more casual or lighthearted alternative to neurodivergent, which does sound quite formal and maybe a bit cumbersome. And this can be used in lots of ways. So it can be used as a form of language play, particularly to problematize terms like mild autism by saying, I don't have mild autism. I have spicy autism. I have sour autism or I have lemon and herb autism as some intertextuality with the Nando's menu. So it can be a form of language play. It can also have a practical sense. So people might identify with a lot of neurodivergent traits but don't have a formal diagnosis as there are a lot of barriers to do so. Or people who don't want to disclose their diagnosis or maybe have multiple diagnosis. And so saying, I'm NeuroSpicy, gets this across in a playful lighthearted kind of way. But like all terms, it's not without its critics. There are some people who might consider it to be too silly or even in fantasizing. Yeah, I think semantic reclamation is such an important part of our language. And we've seen it across so many marginalized groups. For example, the LGVTQ+ community. I think within semantic reclamation, the most important part is that the community is reclaiming that themselves. And I think sometimes within the neurodiverse community, it's very easy for it to be taken. I think with brains is like NeuroSpicy, what wants belonged to a group of collective neurodiverse community. But they weren't represented within their language. Has now been brought outside of it and used in a more walking way and linking back to that kind of youthy misentred or a word or like a phrase that was once used positively as now possibly become something else. But I think it is so important that the individuals within the community have access to language in terms that they feel kind of applies to them. Within that, there's been many attempts to change the languages to label and describe neurodiverse people. So things such as people first terms or identity first terms and other related issues. What are some examples of that? And are there any problems associated with these terms? So a student listeners may have noticed that I've been using autistic person a lot rather than other terms like person with autism or has autism. And there's a lot of debates around which term is the most appropriate to use. A 2016 study by Lorkin, Kenny and colleagues, they wanted to look out what terms do people use and people prefer. So they did a big survey, they asked autistic people, they asked parents and family members of autistic people and professionals or clinicians who work with autistic people. They asked everybody, what do you think of terms like autistic person versus person with autism? Has autism versus is autistic? As well as other terms like on the spectrum, as the autism spectrum disorder. They wanted to look at if there's any differences between how people use and think of these terms. No term was universally endorsed by everybody. The least polarizing was autism spectrum on the autism spectrum. And what was interesting was that there were significant differences in what each group preferred. So autistic people were much more likely to prefer identity first language as in autistic person, or as professionals were more likely to prefer person first language, IE person with autism. Parents and family members fell somewhere in between. So we've got big differences. between people with lived experience and people who don't in terms of the language. This study was done 10 years ago. I think it'll be really interesting to repeat it and see we have changes given that we've had 10 more years of research and awareness of the neurodiversity paradigm. So we have big differences between what terms people use and why they use them. So person first language is in person with autism. This is often used in the context of disability as a way of emphasising personhood over the diagnosis. It's used particularly often when we talk about mental health. So she has depression rather than she is depressed or the man with a mental illness versus the mentally ill man whereas the identity first terms there are thought to be more stigmatising because they foreground the condition rather than the person. However, it's a bit different when we think of autism. Autistic people in the survey said they prefer identity first language, i.e. autistic person because autism is a big part of who they are. It's something intrinsic to them, how their mind works and move through the world and it makes no sense to say I have autism because they didn't acquire autism. You can't queue at autism. It's something that's a big part of who they are. People say I wouldn't be me if I wasn't autistic and therefore it does not make sense to say I have autism. It makes more sense, it's more accurate to say I am autistic. People also compared it to other big identity labels. So you'd say a gay person, not a person with homosexuality, for example. So we've got two different camps there as opposed to which language is preferred. Another interesting point here, and research, harmonic, both there. They point out that while person first language was designed to respond to dehumanisation and violence, the terms are often used in a dehumanising way. So you see a lot of public campaigns or discourses, that position autism as something separate from the person or even as an invader. So parents of autistic children saying that autism stole my child or my child is trapped inside autism. So positioning autism as separate from the person can be used in quite a dehumanising way. Something that is interesting is that the least polarising term was on the autism spectrum, which is person first. You would say he is on the autism spectrum or the person on the autism spectrum at foreground, but the person first, this was least polarising between the two. They suggest that the phrase still identify someone as part of a group. So the person on the cricket team. And it kind of perhaps functions as a middle ground between person first and identity first. And that's why it's the least polarising. And again, like I said before, with functioning labels, it's usually best to use the terms that a person describes and uses for themselves. So while most autistic people prefer to sick people, if somebody prefers to just call themselves a person with autism, then I think it's best to respect that person's views. Yeah, and I think it's interesting that if we're going to use the terms that autistic people want to use for themselves when doing kind of future research that maybe takes a more general look at autistic people more as a whole, what terms would you recommend there, what would kind of be the next step in future research that would still respect all autistic people, but also being general enough to be simple and to use? So first, it's important to make sure that we are actually using the terminology that people prefer because there is a big gap. Monique Bothert, I did another survey with Ailey Cage. They did a survey of autism researchers and found that while half the researchers they surveyed said they agreed with and liked identity first language, only about a quarter of them actually used it in their research papers. So it's important to actually be consistent and practice what we preach. This does also relate to language and power and gatekeeping. Some journals do require you to use person's first language, particularly in clinical psychology, and this kind of language might be the norm, but it's very entrenched. But we are able to push back against this, and we do see more journals that require you to use identity first language or strongly encourage it or maybe have a list of more sensitive ways to talk about it. So it's also important to use language that's accurate and sensitive rather than language that is stigmatising. So for example, the several examples I could give here, sometimes you will see descriptions of autistic people having challenging behaviour or problem behaviour. Well, what do we mean by challenging or problem behaviour from whose perspective is it challenging? Is it not better to use the actual, to describe the actual thing that the person is doing? Similarly, the language used to talk about autistic people's interests. Most autistic people have at least one area of a highly intense interest. These interests might be more niche or specific, they might be engaged with very intensely. And so the literature and scientific discourse does often describe these in a pathologising way, talking about restricted interests, circumscribed interests, obsessive interests or fixations. And these terms are considered to be pathologising or stigmatising. In common discourse, they're often referred to as special interests, similar to special education. And so some people dislike these terms, call them patronising. And so there's push to replace them with focused interests or intense interests, which are a bit more neutral. Another one would be terms we use to describe how autistic people communicate. So it's estimated that 25 to 35% of autistic people do not speak or only speak a little bit. We don't have statistics, but adults, this has not been researched as much. And so often these people are called nonverbal. However, this term is very vague. There is a push to use terms like non-speaking, because just because somebody doesn't speak, doesn't mean they can't communicate. People might use forms of assisted or mentored communication, like picture mats or alphabet charts. People might use text to speech devices. They might communicate in writing or by gestures. So it doesn't mean they are not able to verbalise and communicate. They just don't speak. However, this is a very recent development of push to use terms non-speaking or minimally speaking. We still see nonverbal use quite a lot. So this is a case that language change being motivated by accuracy and precision, but also about sensitivity and recognising the person's agency. So to add to your question, it's important to be using language that is accurate and precise and is sensitive to the people's needs and is also preferred by the community in question. Something also important that's not related to language, but I would like to bring up, is that it's important that research is done in accordance with the needs and values of the autistic community. There is a large gap in the research that autistic people want and the research that gets funded. There's been several studies which ask autistic people what research do you want to see? And always at the top, it's things like, how can we design autistic friendly mental health support? What accommodations help people in education and employment? At the bottom of the list is research into what causes autism, what genetic factors are related to autism. However, if you look at what does get funded, it's always this biological stuff. So it's important that research is trying to address what needs people actually want and always this is things that will help us now. People need help now. So a lot of online discourse has come out around autism and it's kind of desensitized to the point where autism is almost become an adjective more than anything else. And how could this be potentially harmful to society's view or to see people as a whole and how does this kind of take away from neurodiverse people being able to refer to themselves how they want to be referred at? So there's a lot of examples about this. One that springs to my mind immediately is the phrase "tism" or "touch of the "tism", which is a clipping of autism. Similar to neurospicy, it can be used in a light-hearted, identity-marker kind of way. No, in the context of, I've done something that's considered very autistic. Ha-ha, it's the "tism". And when that's done in an in-community way, that can be, you know, fun, light-hearted. But then there are cases of it undergoing semantic broadening and being used outside of the community, as you say. So people who are not autistic, describing themselves as having a touch of the "tism" if they, for example, know a lot about a particular subject or I didn't understand this joke, ha, it's the "tism". When people who are not autistic say this, people in the autism community often do take offense in the same vein as somebody saying, "Oh, I'm a bit OCD because they keep their desk tidy." And so using conditions as adjectives or as jokes. People think that this is invalidating and denying what it's like to be autistic. Of course, as I said before, when I was talking about neurotypical versus neurodivergent, it's not meant to imply that there's no shared traits between people, but at the same time autistic people say that if a non-autistic person is describing themselves as being a little bit autistic, that invalidates the struggles of the autism community and turns their identity into a bit of a joke. which people are very strongly against. Yeah, so in your kind of work in linguistics in general, you've used a critical discourse analysis before. So how do you think this technique could kind of apply to approaching this area of linguistics? So there's two aspects. So regarding the discourse analysis part, it's about trying to understand and analyse what autistic people actually do in social interaction rather than trying to judge autistic communication against a neuro-typical standard for what autistic people should be doing. Often linguistics and discourse research has identified common traits and characteristics of autistic communication in a pathologising way. So I mentioned that some autistic people do not speak, but some autistic people speak a lot. Autistic people might engage in what's termed topic perseveration or extended model logs, meaning speaking at length about a particular topic or continuing to the topic after the other person has moved on. From a deficit perspective, this would be attributed to autistic people lacking theory of mind, meaning unable to see things from the other person's point of view. And so they would describe autistic people as talking too much in a pragmatics terms, you might say violating the maximum quantity. And therefore people might judge autistic people as being rude or impolite. However, if you want to look at this critically, we will be thinking, okay, who was to say what's talking too much? Who gets to decide what the appropriate amount of communication is? Who gets to decide what's polite and what's rude? And we find that when autistic people talk to other autistic people, there's generally more acceptance of the fact that somebody might talk at length about a topic, particularly a topic of their intense interest. This is even giving the name info dumping. And this is a very valid and even preferred or accepted way of communicating within the autism community. So to take a critical discourse perspective, while looking at the terms that people are using to describe autistic communication and thinking about how it contributes to stigmatisation. And we're also trying to judge autistic communication on its own terms and not against neuro-typical standards, recognising that communication styles might be different, but it's still just as valid. Yeah, I think this is a really important topic to discuss when doing research. And if it's okay with you, I'd like to ask kind of what your current research is looking like and areas where this may apply in your own research. Yeah, I'm a postdoctoral researcher on the autism and affinity spaces working with Professor Nellia Kiteko. So the project explores how autistic people interact within online interest groups, ranging from the more formal ones like discord service or Facebook groups to the more informal ambient groups like users of an Instagram hashtag. So this project is looking at how people interact in spaces relating to interest. Because as I said before, a lot of autistic people have at least one area of highly intense interests. And intense interests and can bring people a lot of joy, they're a big part of somebody's identity, and people might come to quite a lot of knowledge about it. And so people might go online to a lot of reasons, so to learn more about these interests, like by watching YouTube videos, and also to talk about their interests, their answering questions about it, or meet other people who have the same interests. And so this increasing research, recognizing the social and communicative function of interests. An autistic person might struggle to make small talk or social chit chat, but talking about this area of intense interest can be a lot easier and more comfortable, more engaging. A lot of researchers looked at schools, for example, finding that autistic people might be more engaged in the classroom if the subject is related to an interest, for example. And similarly, there's a lot of research which shows how autistic people might find it easier to communicate online as opposed to face-to-face, for example, because most social media communication, the exception being, you know, TikTok, for example. Most communication is through writing. And so when you're writing, you don't need to make eye contact with somebody, you don't need to interpret body language or facial expressions. There's also a lot more time because it's usually asynchronous, so you can take your time to process the information, to write your reply, and for many other reasons as well. So the project brings these two aspects together, interest communication and online communication. We do a mixture of methods, so including surveys, interviews, ethnography, linguistic analysis. We want to know more about what drives people to join these spaces, what people like about them, what they don't like about them, what communication is like in these spaces, and what barriers exist and what might drive people away or stop people from being able to actively participate. One goal is we want to see if interest-based spaces could be an effective social bridge between autistic and non-autistic people, and how can we design social media spaces that are inclusive and accommodating of diverse communication, sensory and information processing needs. For example, if online interest groups are they more acceptable of autistic styles of communication, so it's taken as a given that somebody might talk for a long time about a particular subject area, that people might be using more specialist vocabulary that they've picked up, maybe in an online space, they might have very clear rules of what you're allowed to post about and how much you can say what you're allowed to do as opposed to unstructured social interaction. So on the whole we're looking at online interest-driven communication, what the benefits are, and also how we can make these spaces better and more inclusive. It's really interesting stuff, so how much longer have you got to go on the project? So I'll be working on the project for about another year and a half, but it will be ongoing after that, because later in the future we'll be doing some more workshops with a practical side. Yeah. An interesting aspect of the study that we did is we called it the captioned images study, so we followed people on social media so we could get examples of what they were posting, so that we could do linguistic analysis of it, but we were also aware that from the interviews that we did, that a lot of people struggle with anxiety online, so they might not feel comfortable posting, or people's interests might be considered more stigmatised or inappropriate. For example, we had a lot of people who were interested in things like Lego and saying that people think Lego is for kids, so I can't post about Lego on Instagram. So we gave people a private social media just about their interests, so only we could see. And so we're going to be doing some multimodal analysis of these posts, so looking at the images that people were producing and how and the captions and the relationships between images and captions. So that's a future development of the project. Interesting. Yeah, I think that brings us to the end of our questions for you, doesn't it? Have you got any other sort of closing points, friar, and miles you'd like to bring up? I think the research sounds so incredibly interesting, and I think throughout the podcast as well, just talking about these things is not only just inclusive to myself and my own advocacy for the new diverse community, but also for any listeners out there who may feel marginalized or feel that language, they aren't represented with their language. I hope that this podcast is enabled. A bigger discussion, hopefully. Yeah, and I think from someone who isn't autistic, I hope any narrative of cool listeners have kind of come to have a wider understanding of the terms that they might use to describe autistic people and the real effect that it has, so it's not just a word that you've said and it doesn't mean anything. It can be very harmful and stigmatizing, so I think we're just happy to bring awareness to that. Yeah, I think the most important thing is education and awareness and actually listening to the autistic community. A lot of these developments are new and people might not be aware of them, so it's important that everybody tries to educate themselves and just try to learn because it is important. Thanks very much Jess, thanks very much for taking part in this really interesting, and thank you very much to Freya and Miles, because this idea came from you too. It wasn't something that I came up with and then roped other people into. You came up with your idea through all your teacher as well and got in touch and I think it's brilliant that you've done so much work on this research on it, you've come up with the questions, you've done more background reading than I have on this and you've asked better questions. The question is fantastic, they were really intellectually stimulating to think about. They were great questions. Yeah, thank you very much, Freya and Miles, for all of your input on this and clicking it off in the first place. I think the topic is also really interesting for a level of students, it touches on issues of language and power, it touches on language and identity, language and technology. I think the subjects were so interesting in general. I think without the amazing work of our teacher, it wouldn't have been possible, but I hope this is also sparked and interesting some of the listeners to explore the parts of language that they don't feel representative in or they feel that needs to be looked at. Brilliant, right, so thank you very much. (upbeat music)