Autism, Advocacy Organizations, and Past Injustice
Abstract
<jats:p>Fruitful connections can be made between Disability Studies and post-conflict
transitional justice, two areas of scholarship concerned with human rights and the
impacts of violence that have rarely been brought into critical dialogue with one
another. For over a decade, one of the world's largest and best-known autism organizations,
the US-based Autism Speaks, has been subject to criticisms and boycotts by autistic
self-advocates and their allies. This article describes the forms of harm attributed
to the organization, arguing that these harms can be viewed through the lens of what
transitional justice scholar Jill Stauffer calls "ethical loneliness": "the experience
of being abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard" (2015b,
1). I argue that Autism Speaks's recent reforms and responses to criticism, in focusing
largely on present-day organizational policies and structures, fail to grasp the full
temporal dimensions of ethical loneliness or the importance of addressing past injustice.</jats:p>
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/25722Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.18061/dsq.v38i4.6222Publication Info
Rosenblatt, Adam (n.d.). Autism, Advocacy Organizations, and Past Injustice. Disability Studies Quarterly, 38(4). 10.18061/dsq.v38i4.6222. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/25722.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
Collections
More Info
Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Adam R. Rosenblatt
Associate Professor of the Practice of the International Comparative Studies Program
Adam Rosenblatt is Associate Professor of the Practice in International Comparative
Studies at Duke University and the Interim Director of the program in 2022-2023. An
artist and scholar of human rights, the ethics of care, and our ties to the dead,
he is the author of Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science after Atrocity (Stanford
University Press, 2015), a

Articles written by Duke faculty are made available through the campus open access policy. For more information see: Duke Open Access Policy
Rights for Collection: Scholarly Articles
Works are deposited here by their authors, and represent their research and opinions, not that of Duke University. Some materials and descriptions may include offensive content. More info