Conference Program

This contribution presents the preliminary results of a study conducted with students enrolled in the Primary Education Degree Programme at the Department of Education Sciences of Roma Tre University, who are involved in a research-training project carried out as part of the Inclusive Education Laboratory (channel 5) and aimed at deconstructing stereotypes about neurodivergent people, particularly those with autism. At the beginning of the Laboratory, the students, organised into groups, are asked to provide a definition of “autism” and to describe some characteristics of people on the spectrum. The aim of this activity is to bring to light stereotypical or prejudicial narratives that may already be ingrained in trainee teachers and that derive from previous educational experiences and media content. In this sense, it is interesting to map the degree of adherence of the sample to certain rhetorical devices inherent in disability, such as pietism, supercrip or normal diversity (Vadalà, 2013), but also to interpretative models such as the biomedical model, which view disability as an individual tragedy (Oliver, 1990; Bocci, 2021), and autism from the perspective of deficits and/or lacks with respect to an almost undisputed neurotypical norm.

The process of critical analysis of established conceptual structures is initiated by the workshop facilitators through the viewing of images from mainstream films and television series, presented as case studies aimed at demonstrating how audiovisual narratives have played a fundamental role in the dissemination of an autistic extremotype (Brekhus, 2018) in the collective imaginary (Albanese, 2023), producing misrepresentation (Murray, 2008) of the condition. By sharing alternative interpretative lenses – such as those of Disability Studies (Goodley et al., 2013; Monceri, 2025) and Critical Autism Studies (Valtellina, 2020) – the training process itself can proceed, supported by audiovisual products that deal with autism in a more multifaceted and intersectional way (De Castro, 2023), introducing into the discourse identity variables that have a significant impact on the autistic experience, such as sex/gender, race, social class and sexual orientation.