Doing, Being and Becoming The Sociality of Children with Autism in Activities with Therapy Dogs and Other People Olga Solomon, University of Southern California This paper examines theories of sociality against ethnographically informed understandings of the sociality of children afected by Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) interacting with therapy dogs and other people. I explore from an occupational science and occupational therapy perspective how theories of human sociality inform our understanding of the ways in which a child’s social engagement is supported during child–dog interactions; and how analysis of the data might problematize some theoretical assumptions about sociality, specifcally, the primacy of language and theory of mind, and the ‘humans only’ position. Keywords: autism, embodiment, experience, participation, engagement, counter- linguistic turn, therapy dog A teenage girl walking a dog down a suburban Southern California street is an ordinary sight but the pair that can be seen every day in the neighbourhood where I live is not quite ordinary. Over the past ten years I have watched this girl walk this dog in the purposeful, hurried stride of a person who has things to do. During these years the dog has turned from a lanky puppy into a dignifed Golden Retriever, and the girl has turned from a slightly overweight child with a developmental disability into a confdent-looking, athletic teenager. She and I have always exchanged greetings but recently I lingered afer saying hello and asked her what her dog’s name was. ‘Sunshine,’ she said, and added that the dog is now ten years old, that she got the dog right afer September 11th, 2001, and that she works to pay for dog food and veterinary bills. ‘Tere is even some money lef for myself,’ she said with a smile, but this did not come across as ironic. I looked at the girl’s smiling face and wondered how much of this conversation was made possible by the dog sitting at her feet. Such observations of children’s sociality in interactions involving dogs were not new to me. But it was a single experience that moved me to pursue research in this area: at a park in a Southern California town, my own dog, a female border collie, carefully placed a Frisbee at the feet of a girl who was standing nearby with her father, inviting her to play. Te dog then assumed an anticipatory position in preparation for what she Cambridge Anthropology 30(1), Spring 2012: 109–126 © Cambridge Anthropology doi:10.3167/ca.2012.300110