Autism, Advocacy Organizations, and Past Injustice
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<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>
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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.
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Adam R. Rosenblatt
Adam Rosenblatt is Professor of the Practice in International Comparative Studies and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. An ethnographer interested in human rights, the ethics of care, and our ongoing ties to the dead, Rosenblatt is the author of Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science after Atrocity (Stanford University Press, 2015), a winner of Choice's 2016 Outstanding Academic Title award, and Cemetery Citizens: Reclaiming the Past and Working for Justice in American Burial Grounds (2024). Cemetery Citizens is an ethnography of grassroots groups working to preserve and honor places of the marginalized dead. The book largely focuses on ongoing reclamation efforts in African American burial grounds, including Durham's own Geer Cemetery. It uses sketches and poetic inquiry to “draw out” the voices and active, embodied presence of descendants, grassroots activists and memory-workers.
Adam is a cartoonist and graduate of the year-long certificate program at the Sequential Artists Workshop. His comics work includes serving as a graphic ethnographer for a team of anthropologists working in northern Uganda, the serialized comic A Little Golden Promise, and various contributions to anthologies and advocacy zines. He is also working on a project about using comics as a teaching method in liberal arts courses. You can see some Adam's comics, collages, and drawings on Instagram at @researchcartoonist.
In Durham, Adam works with the Friends of Geer Cemetery, teaches community-engaged courses, and is the co-founder of the Durham Black Burial Grounds Collaboratory, an academic-community-cemetery partnership funded by the Duke Endowment.
Adam has published additional research about the politics of autism, civic engagement and teaching, and human rights activism in Disability Studies Quarterly, Human Rights Quarterly, The Applied Anthropologist, Hybrid Pedagogy and other journals. He has been consulted by the United Nations and other policy-makers on questions of missing persons and mass graves, and serves on the Faculty Advisory Board of the Duke Human Rights Center.
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