Cripping Social Interaction Norms in Public Transport

Combining insights from ethnomethodology and crip theory, the paper offers new perspectives on interactional accessibility in public transport. Inspired by the concept of universal design, it approaches interaction access as interaction norms that are accessible to a universal set of people. Dominating conceptualisations of interaction are largely grounded in research conducted by neurotypical researchers and based on data from neurotypical participants, which risks reinforcing narrow conceptualisations of what counts as 'normal' interaction and obscuring the diverse ways people navigate in complex, real-world settings such as buses, trains, and stations. In response to this concern, the paper reports on a small video study following neurodivergent children and their carers on public transport. The paper tracks the meticulous, yet subtle ways in which passengers reproduce 'normal' expectations about appropriate displays of attention, utilising the 'inappropriate' and disruptive attention of the neurodivergent child as a magnifying lens that exposes this as of yet under-explored aspect of ableism in social interaction and calls for an increased attention to interaction access.