(Un)Reasonable, (Un)Necessary, and (In)Appropriate Biographic Mediation of Neurodivergence in Academic Accommodations

Abstract

Biographic mediation of disability through accommodations bureaucracies in the academic workplace attempts to contain and control difference in such a way as to leave intact the fundamentally ableist set of values, practices, and built environments that constitute the institution known as "the university." The main sites of biographic mediation of disability in the academic workplace are diagnosis, the formalized processes of disclosure and verification in the university accessibility bureaucracy, and the enactment and framing of any granted accommodation. Attention to the forms and practices by which biographic mediation is enacted can show, Coletu asserts, "emerging patterns and tactics of governance, reform, and resistance" ("Call for Papers"). In this paper, neuroqueerness is employed as an identity and as a heuristic to contest the means by which workplace accommodations deny autobiography and agency to neurodivergent academics.