Sara Sjödin
About Sara Sjödin
I am a doctoral researcher in education with a focus on inclusion, disability, and lived experience in educational and institutional contexts. My work is grounded in critical phenomenology and qualitative methodology, with particular attention to how inclusion, recognition, and participation are shaped through everyday practices, institutional rhythms, and normative expectations.
A central strand of my research explores autistic experience across the life course, with a specific focus on narrative identity, unevenness, and the conditions under which coherence, belonging, and exhaustion emerge. I am interested in how autistic cognition and perception are often misdescribed through deficit-oriented or overly generalised models, and how alternative conceptual frameworks can better account for depth, rhythm, and context-dependence in autistic lives.
Alongside this, my research engages with questions of inclusion under conditions of austerity and accountability, examining how educational and welfare institutions increasingly tie recognition to performance, flexibility, and usefulness. I am particularly interested in how such conditions produce forms of conditional inclusion and inclusive exhaustion, and how these dynamics are lived rather than merely enacted in policy.
Methodologically, I work with phenomenological interviews, narrative approaches, and reflective, participant-attuned research designs. Across my work, I seek to develop forms of inquiry that are ethically careful, temporally generous, and responsive to different ways of sensing, thinking, and being in the world.
Current project
I am currently conducting a qualitative interview study with autistic adult women, focusing on life narratives, sense of self, and experiences of belonging and misattunement across education, work, and social life. The study is designed with a strong emphasis on predictability, consent, and participant-defined pacing, and forms part of my broader doctoral project on autistic narrative identity.