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Popular neuroscience and psychiatry would have us believe that ‘people with autism’ are blind imitators—lacking in agency, sociality, and empathy. Moving beyond these oversimplifications, the Autistic Life and Language (ALL) Project in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder aims to fill a significant research gap in applying sociocultural linguistic frameworks to various sub-projects that explore, ethnographically, the social lives of autistic people.

• Our sub-project on accents and autism explores the experiences of autistic folks who have adopted ways of speaking that defy the normative expectations of their background—and asserts that this practice is agentive rather than unthinking.
• Our sub-project on romance and autism challenges the notion that autistic folks suffer with deficits around the expression of love, instead reflecting autistic lived experiences of their own underrecognized love languages (scaffolded by a critical analysis of the US television series Love on the Spectrum).

It is our hope that these sub-projects will result in journal publications that complexify social scientific representations of autistic people, respecting their ways of being rather than casting their behaviors as pathology.

Here at the ALL Project, we aim to foster an accommodating and inclusive environment, especially for our undergraduate researchers, in the burgeoning field of neurodiversity studies. Members of the ALL Team hail from diverse backgrounds across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Some are multilingual, and several self-identify as autistic and neuroqueer self-advocates! In time, we hope to springboard the ALL Project into a Center for Autistic Life and Language here at the University of Colorado Boulder.