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KEYWORDS: Autism; Autistic adults; Autistic children; Disability; Disabled professionals; Discrimination in employment; Employment discrimination; Libraries and people with disabilities; Library management; Neurodiversity.
BRAVERMAN ESSAY 2013
Introduction
The entrance to the library spilled into reference and circulation desks, self checkout machines, a whirl of human activity. As I stood there, attempting (and failing) to get my bearings, disparate, chattering flocks of undergraduate students floated around me in random formations. I clutched the neat list I had compiled of books and call numbers like a talisman and inside felt the first few flutters of panic.
Constant motion was my only defense against the milieu of the library. It can be difficult to know where my limbs are in space or to anticipate how others will move, but walking quickly in whatever direction still mutes the fear of human interaction and the anxiety generated by spatial disorientation. It is also a more socially acceptable - though less effective - coping mechanism than hand flapping or spontaneous vocalization.
After a few haphazard turns and loops around the first floor, I found an elevator to the stacks, where yellow fluorescent lighting buzzed overhead, vibrating through my eyes and into my brain. Dizzy and nauseous, I marched around several floors of the library with a kind of mock purpose, until I had obtained half of the books on my now crumpled list and could leave tlie library without feeling as if I had failed some sort of strange test.
In truth, I am accustomed to spaces that were clearly designed without someone like me in mind. My sensory integration difficulties, my spatial confusion, my social anxiety: all are constitutive of neurological atypicality that puts me at a systematic disadvantage in a society structured around a rather specific human ideal. Yet while I generally anticipate that most of tlie places I go will be less than accommodating, this is not tlie case for libraries. Throughout my life and into tlie early stages of my library career, I have come to expect more of these institutions. My expectations are tied up with a concept of tlie library as "safe space," as well as with the core principals of the field1. So when tlie library fails to live up to such expectations -...