Autism and the Empathy Epidemic

Threading an enquiry through debates in neurodiversity scholarship and disability studies as well as film theory, this open access book challenges the widespread idea that autism is an epidemic characterised predominantly by a deficit of empathy, arguing that the reverse is true: we are living through an empathy epidemic in which autism is the outcast.

In 1908, the British psychologist, Edward Titchener, translated the German term Einfühlung into the English language as 'empathy', around th...