Using body mapping within a participatory methodology to enable autistic girls to share their experiences of education: considerations for social justice, embodied awareness, and knowledge production

Body mapping is an arts-based method designed to foreground how people feel rather than what they think. Body mapping can support the surfacing of often unheard or otherwise inaccessible or suppressed experiences because meaning making is non-spoken as well as spoken. For marginalised groups, where power imbalances between the researchers and the researched may be considerable, body mapping is argued to be one way in which participants can contribute on their own terms. Autistic people report distinctive embodied subjectivities of the world, often due to sensory differences. Body mapping may be a method that is well suited to exploring these embodied subjectivities with autistic young people whose experiences tend to be marginalised or overlooked. Most body mapping research has focused on health-related topics with very little application in education or with autistic young people. This paper reports on the use of body mapping to explore school and transition experiences with 11 neurodivergent young people in the UK: 8 girls and 3 boys aged 11-17 years, nine with autism diagnoses. We evaluate our application of body mapping according to its potential for (1) exploring embodied awareness (2) enabling social justice and (3) supporting knowledge production and translation.