Name
“The way I was living was really unsustainable for me, even though it seemed very normal for everyone else”: Neurodivergent Labour Geographies, Social Reproduction and Precarious Work beyond the Workplace
Date & Time
Friday, May 23, 2025, 1:30 PM - 1:45 PM
Description
Late 20th century restructurings of the labour market in the Global North, the growth of precarity, and accompanying strain on social reproduction have been well addressed by labour geographers. Yet, the experiences of disabled workers under neoliberal capitalism have received scarce commentary, highlighting the productivism in the field. This paper inserts neurodiversity into labour geography as a position invested with epistemic authority – a perspective from which intimate knowledge of the capitalist system emerges. Through twenty-two semi-structured interviews, I explore how neurodivergent workers navigate social reproduction in a labour market characterized by polarization, precarity, emotional labour, weakened social assistance, and individualized accommodations. My analysis draws from Marxist-Feminist disability studies to assert that neurological difference, like other disabilities, is socially and materially created and dis-abled by the exploitative conditions of capitalist wealth accumulation. Taking up a feminist geographical lens, my investigation draws from Pamela Moss’s theorization of the home environment as a relational, fluid yet bounded space constructed by the broader political economy. Ultimately, I assert that neurodivergent workers consciously occupy positions of persistent precarity and agentively manage their disability through social reproductive tactics at multiple scales. These tactics involve the micro geographies of care work, intimate accommodation, and neglect, and the urban geographies of neighbourhoods and crip kinship networks. Despite these agentive managements, I conclude that ND workers face high temporal, financial, social, and mental costs because of their disablement within social reproduction. These costs of managing disablement under capitalism offer novel insights into labour geography scholarship, (dis)abling its current narrative of precarious work.
Location Name
Mackenzie (ME) 4236
Session Type
Oral Presentation
Abstract ID
193
Speaker Name
Grace Pawliw-Fry (they/them)
Speaker Organization
York University
Session Name
CS156 Work and Labour Geographies