Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement (A Norton Short)

Things should be allowed to be joyful and fun and autistic without turning them into exercises for social scripting and normative behavior patterns.

We can’t design well for that which is unpredictable. But we can design more accessibly and can invite futures that enable more of us to live and thrive,

Shivers explains how much of autism tech intervention research re-emphasizes pointless norms of communication or creates very strict parameters of norms for behavior to “teach” autistics to appear less autistic in different scripted scenarios—through games with robots, virtual-reality simulations, and video modeling. Panelist Rua Williams picked ba

As McLain put it, “We are not robots. We are just living in a constant state of trauma.”

We need to be wary of technoableism—technology development and marketing that makes it seem like disability is a big, bad thing that needs to be downplayed or eliminated.

They have articulated ten principles of disability justice: Intersectionality, Leadership of those most affected, Anticapitalist politics, Cross-movement solidarity, Recognizing wholeness, Sustainability, Cross-disability solidarity, Interdependence, Collective Access, and Collective Liberation.

McLain pointed out that most studies characterizing autism are of white eight-to-twelve-year-old boys. She also noted that the stereotypes of autistic people as robotic are often drawn from examples of traumatized autistic people. This is because many autistic people have been traumatized—if not through ABA therapy, then through living in a world t

But technology—and the normative ideas of what it means to have the correct body or mind—increasingly separates our selves from the bodies with which we encounter the world.

For some autistic people, eye contact not only doesn’t indicate engagement, it can be actively distracting and/or taxing.