Neurodiversity: From Activist Category to Corporate Buzzword

• In Event: 41025 - Experiencing and Expressing Disability Identities

Abstract

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, 62 qualitative interviews with disability activists and professionals, and five years of intermittent ethnographic fieldwork among autism hiring programs in technology companies. I show that “neurodiversity” emerged in the 1990s 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. Yet, the rebranding of autism as “neurodiversity” or “neurodivergence” legitimizes the hiring of “quirky” technical workers with few 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 ambiguity of the term obscures the fact that they rarely hire people with significant disabilities into permanent positions. Neurodiversity thus functions as corporate doublespeak, and while this doublespeak has been contested by some disability activists, it has not prevented the proliferation of the term as a corporate euphemism. This analysis contributes to social scientific literatures on disability under capitalism and on the circulation of emergent categories.

Author

• Emily Hawley Ruppel, University of California-Berkeley