Neurodiversity: From Activist Category to Corporate Buzzword

Emily Ruppel, University of California, Berkeley

This paper offers a genealogy of the term “neurodiversity,” which emerged from autistic activism in the late 1990s and has taken on diffuse meanings for activists, policymakers, and most recently corporations. I draw on primary historical research, over 40 qualitative interviews with disability activists and professionals, and a year of ethnographic fieldwork among autism hiring programs in technology companies. I show that “neurodiversity” initially emerged from radical disability politics and indexed autistic liberation from oppression. However, in recent years, it has transformed into a corporate euphemism for disability which waters down these radical politics. The corporate uptake of “neurodiversity” attempts to transform disability into a profit-generating category on the grounds of disabled workers’ unique skills and anticipated compliance. Furthermore, the rebranding of autism as “neurodiversity” or “neurodivergence” legitimizes the hiring of disabled people with low support needs and high levels of education, while excluding from the labor force disabled people with lower levels of education or who request expensive or time-consuming accommodations. Large technology companies accrue public relations benefits from neurodiversity programming, but the generality of the term obscures the fact that they rarely hire people with significant disabilities into permanent positions, instead hiring highly-educated people with low support needs and/or outsourcing work to disability-focused organizations which pay lower wages than technology companies themselves. This analysis contributes to social scientific literatures on disability under capitalism and on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” discourses and institutions.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 75. The Expansion/Contraction of Worker Categories