Ways of Knowing, Doing, Being, and Making Inquiry in Loss: Alternative Rhetorics of Autism and Making the Unimaginable More Imagine-able

Sharone Lee, Fielding's School of Human & Organizational Development

This study explored the dimensional qualities and uncommon rhetorical possibilities of information about profound loss realities, and in particular, the mutual impacts of Autism. Innovative documentary methods were initially developed in relation to factual, ideational, contextual, and individual sources of disaster information. These methods were then applied to present and absent knowledge, competencies, values, and perspectives of being in atypical able loss. Through that process, epistemic locations, hermeneutic questions, rhetorical themes and patterns, and phenomenological insights were gathered from and constructed into other ways of knowing, doing, being, and making inquiry in loss. Regulative rigors of transparent uncovery and constitutive challenges of ethical aesthetics guided this long informational journey into the actual conditions, interactional dynamics, relational spans, and particular experiences of our falls into mutual unknowing in profound able loss. Evocative artifacts, implicative discourses, compelling legacies, and sophisticated matters came to represent needed complements to the evidentiary materials, inferential logics, convincing arguments, and statistical traces that surround catastrophe. Eventually alternative rhetorics of a public intellectual working along marginal spaces of liminal being, in profound loss, emerged, were voiced and read, and served to make The Unimaginable more imagine-able.

Keywords: knowledge organization, information society, transformational change, imagination