Olga Solomon
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Latino Families' Experiences With Autism Services: Disparities, Capabilities, and Occupational Justice OTJR (Thorofare N J). 2016 Oct; 36(4):195-203. . View in PubMed
J Autism Dev Disord. 2016 Feb; 46(2):378-93. . View in PubMed
"You Can Turn off the Light If You'd Like": Pediatric Health Care Visits for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder as an Interactional Achievement Med Anthropol Q. 2015 Dec; 29(4):531-55. . View in PubMed
"But-He'll Fall!": Children with Autism, Interspecies Intersubjectivity, and the Problem of 'Being Social' Cult Med Psychiatry. 2015 Jun; 39(2):323-44. . View in PubMed
The social life of health records: understanding families' experiences of autism Soc Sci Med. 2014 Sep; 117:50-7. . View in PubMed
"And I look down and he is gone": narrating autism, elopement and wandering in Los Angeles Soc Sci Med. 2013 Oct; 94:106-14. . View in PubMed
Her ethnographic research has been dedicated to micro-video analysis of social interaction as a way of looking beyond language, to systematically examine how children with autism engage in meaningful activities with their family members, therapists, teachers, and peers in daily life. The abiding interest of her research is in how children with autism co-construct meaning and social relationships with others employing socio-communicative resources that are available to them and their communicative partners in their shared social environment. Because these processes often take place in the context of narrative discourse, narrative analysis figures centrally in her work. She uses a multi-method approach to examine narrative both as a text and as a social interaction, focusing on how communicative bodies in cultural space use a range of semiotic resources (speech, literacy-based artifacts, objects, equipment, therapy animals, etc.) to engage in shared actions, activities, and meaning-making that shape human life. The most important finding of her research so far has been in demonstrating the remarkable communicative abilities that severely impacted children with autism are able to display once their social environment is organized and adapted in ways that supports their communicative potentialities. Fundamental changes in educational and therapeutic practice, however, are necessary to create and maintain adaptations for the children’s success in the socio-communicative sphere.
Research Interests: Dr. Solomon is an applied linguist by training, and her research offers an ethnographically informed perspective on the everyday lives of children and teens with autism and their families. She is a part of an interdisciplinary research team on an NIH-funded longitudinal ethnographic research project that involves African-American children with special health care needs, their families and the practitioners who serve them. She is a recipient of a USC Zumberge Individual Faculty Innovation Award for her project “Animal Assisted Therapy as Socially Assistive Technology: Implications for Autism”. Her areas of interest include: translational research on health disparities and family life; family perspectives on developmental disability and chronic illness; autism and diversity; organization and design of educational environments and family innovation; and autism, innovative technology and animal assisted therapy. She has held National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship for a study of communicative practices of children with severe autism and was Director of the Ethnography of Autism Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 2003 she has served as a advisory board member for the Innovative Technology for Autism Initiative (ITA) of Cure Autism Now and Autism Speaks foundations. She was the Co-Editor, with linguistic anthropologist Elinor Ochs, of a Special Issue on autism in the journal Discourse Studies (2004). Dr. Solomon has also been a contributor on Autism, Savant Ability and Williams Syndrome for the Encyclopedia of Giftedness, Creativity and Talent (Barbara Kerr, ed.) published by SAGE in 2009.