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Krysia speaks with Sarah McHaffie about her PhD research on autistic women.
The transcript of the episode is available here: https://share.transistor.fm/s/c7e95dd9/transcript.txt
The transcript of the episode is available here: https://share.transistor.fm/s/c7e95dd9/transcript.txt
If you have any questions, or just want to say hi, email us at cat@abdn.ac.uk or find us on twitter @autismtheology.
This podcast is brought to you by The University of Aberdeen's Centre for Autism and Theology.
The artwork for this podcast uses the Centre for Autism and Theology Logo, created by Holly Russel
Creators & Guests
What is Autism and Theology Podcast?
The Autism and Theology Podcast is a space where we engage with the latest conversations in the field of autism and theology, share relevant resources, and promote ways in which both faith and non-faith communities can enable autistic people to flourish.
Our episodes are released on the first Wednesday of every month. We have a variety of guests who are related in some way to the field of autism and theology. Some are academics, others are people with life stories to share, and some are both!
We also release CATChat every third Wednesday of the month. These are shorter and more informal episodes where your hosts will share news and give you as listeners an opportunity to ask questions and share your stories.
Krysia: I'm Krysia and it's fantastic that you've joined us this week. The podcast is a space where we'll be engaging with the latest conversations in the field of autism and theology, sharing relevant resources, and promoting ways that help faith and non faith communities enable autistic people to flourish. Our podcast episodes are released on the first Wednesday of every month with Cat chats every 3rd Wednesday where your hosts share news, answer your questions and basically have a bit of a chat with you. This podcast is run from the University of Aberdeen's Centre for Autism and Theology, which we've shortened to CAT. This week I have a fantastic guest with me, I have Sara McHaffie. Hello, Sara!
Sara: Hello, how are you?
Krysia: I'm fantastic and I wondered, for listeners who perhaps don't know of your work, if you could tell us a little bit about yourself.
Sara: Yeah, I am a PhD student at Northumbria [University]. I come from the field of public sociology, which probably warrants an explanation. So that's a type of sociology where I'm interested in Co-generating knowledge alongside groups of people, such as maybe a group of activists. I'm quite influenced by Nancy Fraser, who kind of draws on Marx and uses Gramsci's concept of the subaltern. So kind of somebody who's excluded from systems of power and opposed hab- or mass idea of kind of counter public. So people who are who are again excluded from the kind of public sphere where conversations take place, you're talking sort of parallel to that. And my master's was about how Muslim women and women of color in Edinburgh use film as a form of activism to engage with ideas around public space, and quite interesting creative methods. And I use them now in my PhD, which is about how autistic women as a subaltern, counter public express and engage with feminist ideas to counter epistemic injustice. I used to work for charities and other organizations supporting women. I did that for around 2 decades and I still volunteer with the Scottish Women's Autism Network for SWAN, I co-facilitate the creative group and I lead walks with them. So I'm still kind of still keeping busy in that way. Yeah, that might do. I'm autistic as well. So yeah, I say funny things sometimes.
Krysia: I get that I say lots of funny things too, and I think one of the first things we were going to chat about was we were both at a recent conference together. For listeners, we both presented at the associate – the BSA – to the British Sociological Association, Sociology of Religion (SOCREL), subgroup conference and there was a panel for one of the first times, on disability neurodivergence and religion and Sara and I were both part of that. And I was wondering, Sara, if you could tell us a bit more about some of the work that you shared at that conference, because it was really, really powerful and really empowering for autistic women.
Sara: Absolutely so. The presentation was about ‘a feminist lens on autistic women's experiences of faith’. And you've heard the title of my thesis is not got her religion as a core aspect of the work. But I think being me and coming from a religious background myself and having worked with a religious organization for quite a long time, or faith-based organization, I suppose. It was just partly having honed an awareness of the importance of faith and also just the way that when you reflect on data you bring yourself to it. It was - it was quite stark to me that there was very often mentioned of faith. So I was quite happy to have a way of, you know, finding an outlet for that at the SOCREL conference. I - yeah, I think… I think maybe having, you know, worked places where we didn't have a simplistic notion of, you know, who is religious or somebody with a faith or from a faith background. And I think that maybe runs counter to some of what I've come across elsewhere in, in charities, in the women's sector where people can be quite kind of binary in their thinking about religion. So I was, I was quite excited about some of the things that came up in my project around faith-based communities as a sort of source of strength and fellowship, and also sometimes some are maybe less judgmental or perceived to be less judgmental than other communities. So that coming up was quite interesting for me. And then I think when I pulled the presentation together, I also became interested in places where that didn't work, places where you know somebody's had an experience of being excluded. Or even at times it came up that there had been predatory and abusive behaviours that were happening which, you know, I used to work in the area of spiritual abuse. I know this happens, but it wasn't a project that was explicitly about asking people about those kinds of difficult experiences. So for it to kind of come up in general conversation was, yeah, a little bit. Yeah. Just. Yeah. I think it just got quite angry about it really. And even just, you know, little things like somebody feeling that a church might say that they were inclusive, but actually they're quite rigid about what inclusion looks like. Or, you know, the things that came up in the project around kind of… think so? I'm just gonna. Yeah, I think the one thing that was nice was just how very autistic everybody was. So you know, just kind of a very, very strong view about hypocrisy and I think that's quite interesting. One, it can challenge us in, in faith communities to have it, you know, be brought to the before that there's hypocrisy. But you know, hopefully it won't be a surprise. But the way that that both people, the way that you know you're saying you're inclusive but you're not. Or you're saying that you're, you know, living in a way that's in line with kind of social justice. You're not. Or, you know, you're saying you're about truth.
But then you're being dishonest. So this kind of not living your values.
Not kind of having this practice of like a faith in forums where we're being.
That that was quite an interesting one and the way that that kind of aligns with productive irritants, you know, this kind of somebody who's going to come in and point out all these things that aren't quite right in in the, you know, for the best of intentions and, yeah, I think. I think that was quite a nice strand to be able to kind of follow through when I was talking at the SOCREL conference, but also just, you know, somebody was saying the men were really creepy at a Sunday school when this person was a child and - They wanted them and wanted to sit on you - you to sit on their knee and things like that and just having a sense of being quite uncomfortable.
And the way that that inner faith context was overlapped by this sense of like, you know, God will find out if you if you say anything to anybody. So this kind of.
Spiritual abuse strand that that came through, things that being pressured to forgive people that were abusing somebody. As well and how that then linked him with how people perceives authority figures in general. You know, this might be your first experience of an authority figure. And you know them abusing power and that kind of thing. So yeah, I mean it was. All stuff I'd encountered before in different contexts and to encounter it in a group of autistic women I hadn't asked to be honest about this stuff. Yeah. But in terms of this, faith is a strength. I did think that was a nice one as well. The way that like the way people would kind of talk about. Being you being part of a religious community, being very, very important to someone. And also a faith-based practice is being important, that meditation being helpful for somebody. As an autistic person to kind of regulate and things like that. So yeah, I feel like having not intended to do anything of this nature in this project. There's been really plenty that's come up and also experiencing faith as a performance and it's kind of extended masking and also the way that masking, in terms of the people in the religious community, this person was talking about like performing your faith in public and kind of that different understanding of masking that other people do as well as it being an autistic trait. I thought that was quite a fun one anyway so.
Yeah, that was.
Krysia: Yeah. It's just so much fantastic stuff. And they are struck by a few things, I think especially around the questioning of people say around space is saying they're inclusive and they're not. That also came up in the research that I did.
Obviously I was directly asking about inclusion and belonging, so it would make sense that people would say that, but then there were others, tangential things around power and how gender and masking also became part of what was going on that I Didn't expect to come out of my stuff, so I thought that was really, really, really what kind of almost an overlap to our two works we've had this conversation before where there's been real parallels between that strand of your data and my whole PhD and how that really interacts together backwards and forwards, and I wondered if you could tell me about any other thoughts you have on faith being a source of strength for some marginalized people, including autistic people in particular.
Sara: I - yeah. I just think it's one of these things that people people don't like to talk about. It's like a dirty secret somehow, like, and I suppose. I mean, my own context of maybe sort of socialist lefty type organising or working in in the kind of third sector or yeah, like student politics, things like that. This this maybe it's easier for people to think of religion as something that's quite archaic, and it's quite old fashioned and it starts all the wars, obviously and it's associated with things like. You know, they're quite, quite for long, like forced marriage and that sort of thing, so. That seems to be the kind of prevailing view, and you get this kind of permeating through things like, you know, newspaper reporting and films and books and things. And there's a lot of time for people that maybe haven't have a life story that. That ties in with that narrative, I think. So you do hear it a lot and obviously people do have dreadful experiences in religious context. I've just spoken about some of that, so you know, I'm not naive about it, but I think if that's your only perspective, then when somebody comes to you and they've got a strong faith or their faith background is something that they don't see is entirely negative. You're not going to see them as a full person. You're seeing, you know, maybe 3/4 of who they are. And you're not really understanding their identity and kind of meeting them where they are.
And having worked at the places I worked before and having been part of faith communities myself, OK, it just seems quite obvious to me that people wouldn't be involved in religion if there weren't some benefits, right? So it I think being a bit more even handed about it can enable you to understand people better and to understand how to support people better. So yeah, I think the way that used to come up in my old work would be it would be quite, I mean, I'm going to be a little bit heavy-handed in how I portray this. It's maybe not as bad as this, but like a woman sector organization might tend to have stuff that don't come from big backgrounds that see faith as a very, very negative thing, or somebody who did come from a big background, how to drive full experience and then kind of that's why they're working there. So you kind of keep coming up against this narrative of, like, religion is bad, religion is bad. And I think L Hicks has talked about this. If this is quite a kind of, it's a very partial view of women's lives. For a lot of women from a lot of communities, faith is an important part of who you are and how you form relationships and how you learn about the world. And even if you're not religious yourself, it does inform culture like you know, it just does so. Yeah. It might play out that somebody's maybe encouraged to stay away from religious spaces when actually what might help them to feel better and feel more at peace and contextualize some difficult experiences is maybe to be encouraged to find safe spaces to, you know, express faith like or.
Just, you know, talk to somebody who understands your faith and contextualizes your experience with you, without having you carve yourself in half. So yeah, I don't know if that's answered your question, but there were some thoughts.
Krysia: You know it, it definitely has. So I was thinking about some of the conversations I had with some of the participants I had in my PhD, and sometimes they found being in really normative spaces quite difficult where they were expected to almost perform being the ‘normal’ autistic person and finding small groups or attend in ways that suit them and finding other people like them really helped them re evaluate their relationship with faith and for some of them it did mean that they didn't do faith anymore. But some people, it meant they had a new understanding and I would almost say that faith is one of the complexities of autistic lived experiences. There isn't kind of one way kind of to do it or how it might be, especially when you think of autistic people coming from so many different cultural backgrounds where there's going to be - obviously, religion is not culture, but certain backgrounds do have certain belief systems that kind of might be associated with it and wrapped up in how practicing rituals, perhaps is sometimes important, that I think certainly from an anglophone perspective and background would seem a bit is is doesn't happen for us as much. So I think it's just everything around. But you were saying is just so important when we want to work with autistic people to consider the kind of the nuances and how we might want to unpack that and work with people and support people. I also wondered if there were any findings from the conversations you had that were related to the presentation you did that you were surprised by. Certainly when I did have conversations with people I had for my PhD, there were definitely things that propped up that I didn't expect to come up.
So I'm wondering if there's anything else in that kind of area that surprised you.
Sara: Yeah, I think I might have touched on some of this. I'm sure if I could maybe go into in more detail, I think I liked just the way that just the autisticness of people's responses like in the sense of like people wanted justice and they wanted log at the same time, they wanted things to make sense. So the times that they got frustrated was very often a time when one of space didn't seem to have a sense to it when people were doing things for whatever reason and not really understanding what was going on. And maybe that ties into, like, pedagogy. In some ways, you know, it's helpful to tell people what you're doing and why. So that so people know what's going on and maybe repeat it a couple of times. And I think that the things that we developed in the group that we were running to kind of discuss geminised ideas together would work in lots of different spaces. And people did ask for things like repetition and things like, you know, explaining what's going on and kind of.
Also, not being judgmental and, like I mean I -I know that it's - it's not necessarily possible to kind of completely change who you are in order to fit into a social space, but it would be helpful to be able to reflect on things like being judgmental that you might bring to a space that then kind of impact how some experiences it and I think.
Those sorts of feelings, you know, autistic people often bring to a social space, a sense of like existing trauma and existing, maybe lack of trust around how a group interactions going to go. And so if something like judgementalism that people pick up on really readily because it's happened to you so many times before it, it just has such an impact on whether you feel able to go back somewhere. And another thing I suppose was about people feeling maybe it takes them a long time to pick up that they're being bullied. So the kind of like what I was talking about before this, this kind of you know, we're really inclusive. It's so nice that you're here and the kind of couple of weeks of being super nice to someone that then turns into, like kind of back biting and bad mouthing and things eventually, even someone who's maybe not great at picking up on that sort of thing will work out that this is not a good space. And I think that this dis-ease, recurring themes of of like betrayal almost.
And definitely the hypocrisy, that I think, I think it's. It's always hard to kind of be the person who's like a whistle blower in in a space like that and says like, well, this is not a good dynamic. But if you can take courage from the fact that if you do there were other people that will benefit from you flagging it up, I think that's maybe, maybe one of the things I've been thinking about.
Krysia: Yeah, definitely.And I also wondered because you've had such an extensive background of working with people in faith communities and also from your public sociology studies, how this work overlaps with other work you've done it like, is there any similarities with other groups you've worked with or kind of different? What's going on there?
Sara: Well, one of the things that I did with the Masters project I ran, which was part of a project funded by a City Council. So it was quite a - it was, you know, like a proper third sector thing. But then I was able to do some research alongside - we did similar things where I was asking people, you know what? What are the barriers for you in in your community and what you know? What are the things you're happy with? What are you excited about? Because I don't really like to dwell on into fairly negative stuff. So in that context, people were talking a lot about where they like to go, you know, spaces that they're happy about. And they would also talk about things like the way that people was kind of weaponized and knowledge about somebody's faith to kind of make them feel excluded. So one example was people were aware that somebody would maybe go up to them getting their get in their face kind of thing with a dog on a lead which like a lot of people, don't like dogs on lead coming up to them. But like, it seemed like. If somebody was physically Muslim and they're being targeted by somebody getting in their face with a dog on the lead, they probably know that there's a likelihood that somebody Muslim might not necessarily be used to dogs or want dogs touching them, etcetera so. Like these kind of, I think sometimes we like to think that if we just know more about stuff, then everybody will be more inclusive. I think sometimes people have knowledge, and they can kind of weaponize it. And I think that did come up in, in this project as well, where people were very aware of somebody's vulnerability. It wasn't so much a question of a lack of awareness. It was more they felt able to abuse that knowledge and abuse their position. So I guess, I guess we're feminism comes into it. It's just that that sense of where power is used and where it's misused, and whether we challenge it, I suppose and whether we're noticing these sorts of things as we go along.
Krysia: Yeah, definitely. And I also wonder how you see yourself staying involved in the kind of research that we both do kind of sitting at the intersection of disability, neurodivergence and religion going forward.
Sara: I suppose having put that presentation together is clear to me that you know it's not something I can just excise from the way I think about things and we analyze data. So I do hope that I can kind of honour it more in the future and work into my my work and the way that I plan projects. I really, really involved coming along to the SOCREL conference, and I would absolutely recommend that to anybody as well. And I think those kind of spaces do help you just get a sense of where the people are with this kind of research. And you know what's going on elsewhere. So that's definitely something I'm going to keep going and I would, I would quite like to write up the paper that I gave at the conference because I think I would hope it would complement some of the work you're doing, which yeah it does. There's so much resonance, it's just very obvious once you start looking at it, and hopefully the obviousness will translate into people fixing the problems.
Krysia: Yeah, definitely. And I also wondered if there's any advice you might want to give for people working with autistic women in light of your some of your data and your findings, if there's any kind of specific things or if it's more broad stroke cultural changes that need to happen?
Sara: I mean, we definitely all talked about what works for us in in groups and I do think that's interesting. I will, I will try and write something about that in the future. I think just if people understand that just setting up a group is not acutely inclusive, happy social thing. It's not neutral. It's like there's there's a lot of previous group experience that that can really be an obstacle for somebody when it when it comes to just oh, just come along to this group, which is quite often a way of working welcoming somebody into communities that you know we've got this, that happens. So I think one to one conversations and kind of being able to communicate by messenger and things like that are really nice and parallel to groups that somebody might or might not feel welcome in. I think a lot of the conclusions I'll end up drawing from the doctoral work is very much societal changes, but some of it is little things like wanting people to understand what an autistic person might need or want or how they might communicate. I think that increased understanding plus a sense of you know responsibility to actually do the right thing might help some people. And I also think that kind of maybe signal boosting some of the work that autistic women are engaging in is helpful, because there's so much. It's now. There's a real kind of explosion of it and it feels amazing to be part, but it feels like as well, like, it doesn't always get shared outside of the little bubble.
Krysia: Yeah.
Sara: I mean, some things are quite just like, you know, Hannah Gatsby's comedy, or Fern Brady's or, you know, kind of Maxfield Sparrow's work. Like, there's a lot of very diverse people that are talking about having grown up as girls and the experiences that they had. And yeah, it's out there if you look for it, I think.
Krysia: Yeah, because I guess almost one of the recommendations I had going forward from my work was for people to kind of learn what it means to be autistic from alongside autistic people, and certainly from my experience of faith groups.
If it's not necessarily seen as directly kind of religious group relevance of churchy or mosque or mosques, people might not necessarily see how it directly is relevant to that group. So I just think pulling on those narratives and being curious and open and kind of opened being learning new things is just such - so, so important, when we think about empowering autistic women and also when we think about the inclusion of autistic people within religious groups more broadly.
Sara: And I think people are very sensitive to condescension as well. Like, people don't like that kind of patronizing thing, and people don't want to be kind of like, like a success story, that that's kind of like a tokenising, like, oh, this person was so alone and then they joined our church and without us having to really expand any effort, you know, it's all fine now. And I think there's a kind of personal tragedy narrative of disability that is so kind of prevalent even now, even though there's been several decades of, you know, taking the mickey out of it, but like, I think just you know, I'm not using disabled people of any identity as as a kind of, yeah, Oh, isn't it sad? And we can do this and we can pray and we can because it's just so dehumanizing.
Krysia: Yeah.
Sara: So I think that's one of the things I think that the participants that have come along to, to the group have kind of really been quite aware of is these kind of tokenistic and dehumanizing representations of particularly autistic women and girls. But autistic people in general it, just a bit rubbish.
Krysia Yeah, yeah, definitely. And if anybody who's listening to our podcast wants to follow up on your work, or get in contact with you, how is best for them to do that?
Sara: And when I'm on e-mail, it's very easy to find me because I have an institutional e-mail. I'm not sure what else. What do people do now? I'm not sure if anybody's still on Twitter. I have an account on here. I don't know LinkedIn as well. I don't.
I don't know. I don't do. I do anything. Do I talk to people? I don't know.
ike you're probably fair to say to me, I always welcome an e-mail though.
Krysia: And so what's the best institutional e-mail for people to catch you at?
Sara: It is Sara, but obviously spelled without an H dot McHaffie [@] northumbria.ac.uk.
Krysia: Fantastic. Super. So thanks to our listeners for joining us for this episode. If you have any questions, you can message us at autism theology, on Twitter or Instagram, or you can send us an e-mail at cat@abdn.ac.uk. We'd love to hear from you, even if it's just to say hi. And if you do have any questions, please do send them our way and we'll see you for our next episode.