Presuming Competence: A Conversation with Professor Vikram Jaswal, University of Virginia
Part of Every Kid Can's ongoing interview series, where we speak with professionals, advocates, and educators who work alongside people with disabilities every day — to better understand the barriers they face and how youth can be part of the solution.
Every Kid Can was founded on a simple belief: that social isolation and inaccessible opportunities shouldn't stand between kids with disabilities and their peers. To understand these barriers more deeply, we've been sitting down with professionals across the disability field. This installment features Professor Vikram Jaswal, a researcher at the University of Virginia whose work centers on communication and social interaction among nonspeaking autistic individuals — built not from a traditional research lens, but from direct collaboration with the people his work is meant to serve.
What Does Jaswal's Research Look Like?
Jaswal's approach to studying autism starts from a simple but often overlooked premise: "Autistic people are the experts about autism." He explained that it's only in the last decade or so that autistic people have been invited not just to participate in research as subjects, but to help shape it — deciding what questions get asked, how to ask them, and how to interpret and share the results. "This approach has not been embraced by everyone," he noted, "but I certainly think it's going to lead to better, more useful, and more humane approaches to studying autism."
Day to day, his work splits between teaching, research, and service at UVA. Much of his research team's work involves close, ongoing collaboration with nonspeaking autistic people — including a co-design project where a team of ten to twelve people meets regularly to build technology that supports communication skills nonspeaking individuals want to develop themselves.
What's stayed with him most from this kind of work isn't a finding, but a feeling: humility. "I continue to be humbled by the amount of effort and creativity and problem-solving that people who don't have an easy way to communicate in a language-based way have to exert, and also how patient they are," he said. His guiding lesson: listen and learn from the people you're trying to understand, and recognize that you can never fully know another person without genuinely taking the time to.
The Barriers That Remain
Jaswal pointed to one misconception he sees as especially damaging: the assumption that speech and language are the same thing. They're not, he explained — speech is just one way of conveying language, while language itself is the underlying representation of ideas and concepts. When people conflate the two, they often wrongly assume nonspeaking individuals have nothing to say. In reality, he said, most simply haven't yet been given an effective way to express what they already have to communicate.
His response to that misconception is a practice, not just a belief: presuming competence in everyone he interacts with — not assuming people already know everything, but trusting that given the right tools and opportunities, they can learn and communicate.
How We Can Do Better
Jaswal's advice for young people centers on that same principle: presume competence, and treat others the way you'd want to be treated in their position. He cautioned against reading too much into behavior that looks unfamiliar — traits like avoiding eye contact are often misread as disinterest, when in reality, he said, many autistic people are longing for social connection. Unusual movements or behaviors shouldn't be assumed to mean anything in particular either; the instinct to jump to conclusions, he suggested, says more about the observer than the person being observed.
His closing thought reframes the goal simply: most people, autistic or not, are looking for the same basic things — acceptance and belonging. He encouraged young volunteers to talk with nonspeaking individuals in age-appropriate ways, rather than adjusting how they communicate based on assumptions about ability.
Every Kid Can is a youth-led initiative working to expand social and sensory inclusion for people with disabilities across our community. This interview is part of a series in which we speak with professionals, educators, and advocates to better understand the barriers to inclusion and how young people can help close them.