From humble beginnings: reflections on 10 years of the participatory autism research collective

[First lines]

The Participatory Autism Research Collective (PARC) is a voluntary-run network based in the United Kingdom that was founded to bring together autistic people (not exclusively scholars) with researchers and practitioners working with autistic people and particularly those at the beginning of their professional careers. The aim of this network has been to build a community where those who wished to see more significant involvement of autistic people in autism research could share their knowledge and expertise and lessen their isolation. By doing so, it was hoped that this would potentially strengthen research collaborations and give a platform for participatory research. PARC was created by the coming together of researchers working on various projects at London South Bank University (LSBU). Initially envisaged as potentially a research centre at the University, this was altered to a broader (initially national) network that would not be solely based at or dependent on a single institution. This change was inspired by a previous workshop series entitled the ‘Theorising Autism Project’ (Greenstein, 2014), which ran between 2012 and 2014 and was led by some of those who helped to initiate PARC. The first workshop in this series was centred on the topic of education, yet the issue of participation was highlighted very strongly at this meeting and led to the second workshop of this series being based on this as a main topic. This experience was a primary factor in the formation of PARC.