In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the day-to-day challenges facing autistic people and their families.
Nearly 90% of researchers who develop robots for autistic people didn’t bother to ask autistic people if they need the technologies, says Naba Rizvi, a computer science Ph.D. student in the University of California Jacobs School of Engineering and a self-identifying autistic woman.
Rizvi, who is with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, raises this point in an impassioned video and in her work that investigates the stereotypes about neurodiversity perpetuated by computer science research. She is the first author of a new study, “Are Robots Ready to Deliver Autism Inclusion?: A Critical Review,” presented recently at the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
In the qualitative study, Rizvi and her colleagues analyzed 142 human-robot interaction (HRI) papers published between 2016 to 2022 that explicitly identified autistic people as the end-users. They sought to determine whether autism is stigmatized in HRI research and to pinpoint how systemic social inequalities could be reproduced by them.
The team concluded that HRI research papers within their main corpus stigmatize autism and exclude the perspectives of autistic people. Roughly 93.5% of the research in the six-year period applied a model that pathologizes autism– focusing on “treating” autism as an illness– while many of the papers perpetuated gender and age biases as well as power imbalances. Meanwhile, fewer than 10% of the papers included a representative sample of women with autism.
