by Anna Grace Pawliw-Fry
Discriminated against within employment, ND workers put in a lot of work to make work possible. They take up many ‘teetering’ behaviours to cope. These are protective but also unsustainable, causing high temporal, financial, social, and mental costs and, at times, pushing workers out of the labour market entirely.
This study thus revealed a segment of neurodivergent adults is situated as the ‘liminal lumpenproletariat,’ workers who consciously occupy positions of persistent precarity and actively manage their disability to avoid ‘falling’ into the ‘underclass.’
Understanding the costs of managing disablement under capitalism offers insights into labour geography scholarship, (dis)abling its current narrative of precarious work.
Introduction: why neurodivergence is important and why it is becoming more prevalent
Many members of my family are (or were) neurodivergent, though we were often missed along the way. We existed on the edge of a diagnosis that has slowly been reshaped over the last decade by the grassroots activism of the growing neurodivergent community. Neurodivergence (ND), meaning “perceived variations in cognitive, affectual, and sensory functioning differing from […] the ‘neurotypical’ population,” is only a 30-year-old term (Rosqvist et al. 2020, 1). Blume (1997) & Singer (1999) coined the term to push back against stigma – echoing the natural biodiversity of an ecosystem.
Over the past ten years, ‘neurodivergence’ has been adopted by increasing numbers of people. According to the Canadian Survey on Disability (CSD), learning disabilities (including “dyslexia, hyperactivity, attention problems, etc.”) increased by 1.67% between 2012 and 2022 among Canadians aged 15 and older (StatCan 2015 & 2023c). Between 2011 and 2022, diagnoses of ASD also increased significantly, especially among “young adults, female children and adults” (Grosvenor et al. 2024, 1). The rise in diagnoses is connected to decreased stigma and new research on marginalized presentations of ND.
Diagnosis is also connected to changes to work under post- Fordism (1980s-present), the economic model in North America consisting of lean production, precarious work, weakened social assistance, and enlarged knowledge and service sectors. Among 10 countries, de Graaf et al. (2008, 840) find that “adult ADHD appears to be somewhat more prevalent in developed than developing countries.” Workers under post-Fordism experience greater demands on their attentional, emotional, and social abilities, narrowing the ‘normal’ range of neurological ability. According to Critical Neurodivergent scholar Robert Chapman (2023, 107), this has caused a “mass disabling event.”
The Problem of Work:
A rise in diagnosis has implications for workers and employers as ND people conceptualise themselves as such at work.
- A crisis of available work
The well-documented ableism of the labour market presents challenges for disabled workers. Many are pushed out of the labour market – with the 2020 CSD finding only 33% of Autistic Canadians (as classified by the survey) were employed. Yet, the census and CSD miss many recently diagnosed, undiagnosed, and masking neurodivergent workers due to narrow definitions. These workers’ experience of the labour market is unclear, yet anecdotal and online data reveals a crisis of work. - A lack of research
Few emergent questions about ND workers have been sufficiently addressed by the online ND community or by academic fields that study disability, neurodiversity, and/or work
The Study:
In fall/winter 2024, I conducted 22 1–3-hour interviews with participants across the spectrum of neurodivergence. All worked, though to differing levels, and many represented the recently diagnosed, masked, gender marginalized, and older NDers. I supplemented interviews with an analysis of Ontario labour law and Ontario human rights cases. Following a ‘by us for us approach,’ I built access into the study for both participant and researcher. This led me to develop an ‘unmasked methodology,’ which resists traditional neurotypical ways of communicating within academia.
Findings:
- How Neurodivergence Affects Workers
Participant interviews challenged black and white understandings of disability and work. Instead of being discretely outside of the labour market, they navigated precarious work, feeling not quite abled, not quite disabled. I call workers in this threshold position the liminal lumpenproletariat (LL). Workers in the LL consciously occupy positions of persistent precarity and agentively manage their disability to avoid falling into the underclass. They are alive in the ambiguity of the capitalist contradiction, both pulled into the reserve army and pushed into the lumpenproletariat through capitalist calculus.
“We’re always teetering on this – like, are we part of the regular labor market or are we surplus? Yes, we’re always moving
between these spaces […] I need to divorce so I can get on ODSP. […] I’ve been on OWA in my life […] I’m always right on that
edge. […] There’s one time I had, like, a full-time job.” – Irina, 3
“Well, if I didn’t have to go to a job, I don’t think I would mind [having ADHD] so terribly” – Merna, 57 - How ND Workers Teeter at Three Geographic levels
As the LL, ND workers develop a range of strategies at multiple geographic scales to mitigate their disability and maintain work. Though these behaviours were protective they were also often unsustainable, leading to high temporal, financial, social, and mental costs.
The Conclusions:
To successfully teeter through liminal lumpenproletarianization into a good life is based on being dealt a winning hand. The line we teeter upon is volatile; to be safely ‘productive’ is not guaranteed. We will all age and become additionally disabled, leading to more precarity. In the advanced capitalist labour market of North America today, where eugenics is making a strong return – and we see a growing willingness to discard disabled people, it is critical for ND workers to recognize their shared struggle and organize together with other disabled people and workers movements.
Currently, the ND community is still young and largely wrapped up in the potentials for individualized ‘fixes’ for our bodyminds. These are a holdover of the pathology paradigm; instead of healing the individual self, we must aim to heal the world. Yet, this study’s findings show that collective work is difficult due to the sizeable time and energy we ND workers expend just to maintain our precarious employment. When asked for visions of an alternative world, the participants in this study offered a range of imaginative, practical, and insightful ideas. Along with the labour geography of this thesis, which combines embodied worker knowledge with critical theory, ND imagination offers a starting point for policy, advocacy, and worker organizing.
From here, we must develop steps to free up space and time, move beyond daily survival, and towards structural change.
Citations:
Blume, H. (1997a, July 1). ‘Autism & the internet’ or ‘it’s the wiring, stupid’. Media in Transition.
Chapman, R. (2023). Empire of normality : neurodiversity and capitalism. Pluto Press.
de Graaf, R., Kessler, R. C., Fayyad, J., ten Have, M., Alonso, J., Angermeyer, M., Borges, G., Demyttenaere, K., Gasquet, I., de Girolamo, G., Haro, J. M., Jin, R., Karam, E. G., Ormel, J., & Posada-Villa, J. (2008). The prevalence and effects of adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) on the performance of workers: Results from the WHO World Mental Health Survey Initiative. Occupational and Environmental Medicine (London, England), 65(12), 835–842.
Grosvenor, L. P., Croen, L. A., Lynch, F. L., Marafino, B. J., Maye, M., Penfold, R. B., Simon, G. E., & Ames, J. L. (2024). Autism Diagnosis Among US Children and Adults, 2011-2022. JAMA Network Open, 7(10), e2442218.
Rosqvist, H., Chown, N., & Stenning, A. (2020). Neurodiversity Studies: A New Critical Paradigm (1st ed., Vol. 1). Routledge.
Singer, J. (1999). Why can’t you be normal for once in your life? From a ‘problem with no name’ to a new category of disability. In M. Corker & S. French (Eds.), Disability discourse (pp. 59–67). Open University Press.
Statistics Canada (2015). Learning disabilities among Canadians aged 15 years and older, 2012. Government of Canada.
Statistics Canada. (2023). Canadian Survey on Disability (CSD. Government of Canada.
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Grace Pawliw-Fry, Geography MA, has won the York University Thesis Prize for 2026! Their thesis, “Teetering on the Edge of Surplus: Neurodivergent Work, Social Reproduction, and Bodyminds in the Ontario Labour Market” won the Paul Simpson-Housley Award for the best master’s thesis in the Graduate Program in Geography in 2025-26 and was then nominated to FGS for the university-wide Thesis Prize competition. The Paul Simpson-Housley Award is awarded annually to one MA/MSc graduate student in Geography with an outstanding thesis or major research paper (MRP) and one PhD student in Geography with an outstanding dissertation.