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While libraries are increasingly implementing practices and services designed to serve neurodivergent patrons, such efforts have not yet extended to neurodivergent library employees. Libraries consistently claim access and equity as foundational professional values, as outlined in the American Library Association’s Core Values of Librarianship, but these values also need to be upheld through actions within library workplaces instead of solely through resources and services provided for patrons (American Library Association, 2006b). Librarianship may be a profession that is appealing to neurodivergent workers, potentially due to an alignment between the strengths of neurodivergence and the goals and needs of librarianship (Attar, 2021). Yet the lived experiences and workplace needs of neurodivergent librarians remain under-researched and there are no guidelines or established practices in libraries for fostering neuroinclusive workplaces. Not only have the experiences of neurodivergent librarians been overlooked, but library literature has predominantly adopted a pathologized approach to neurodiversity that reinforces harmful, ableist narratives about neurodiversity and neurodivergent people. My work addresses that gap by investigating the employment experience of neurodivergent librarians in public and academic libraries and identifying barriers to and enablers of access. inclusion, and empowerment. To do so, I have highlighted the voices of neurodivergent librarians and their journey of negotiating identity and deploying embodied knowledge to navigate the barriers and enablers they encounter in their workplace and in the library profession.
Historically, research has been conducted on neurodivergent people from a medicalized perspective, focusing on the diagnosis and characteristics of individuals, and often proposing some kind of intervention for the individual person to change them or their behavior in some manner. This study intentionally works in opposition to that perspective, adopting a neurodiversity and critical disability theory approach to conducting research with and by neurodivergent people themselves, and in alignment with their priorities. Critical disability theory, also referred to as critical disability studies (CDS), and its sub-field neurodiversity studies, serves as the critical lens through which this study examines neurodiversity employment in libraries. Critical disability theory draws attention to the societal norms, assumptions, structures, and practices that presume a normate bodymind to the exclusion of other ways of being.
To conduct an in-depth examination of neurodiversity employment in the profession of librarianship, I employed a single embedded case study design to investigate the phenomenon of neurodiversity employment in librarianship. To explore the depth and breadth of the experiences of neurodivergent librarians, neurodivergent supervisors, and their colleagues, and to investigate the context of librarianship, this study used a qualitative approach to data collection and analysis, employing content analysis of interview data and document analysis of library standards and competencies. This study makes use of multiple sources of evidence, including interviews with neurodivergent librarians, neurodivergent supervisors, and neurotypical librarians, along with a document analysis of professional standards and competencies. Evidence was obtained from multiple sources not solely for the purpose of data triangulation, but primarily to gain insight into multiple perspectives within the library workplace.
Through interviews with neurodivergent librarians and supervisors, interviews with neurotypical librarians and supervisors, and document analysis of guiding professional documents, my analysis found that neurodivergent librarians encounter a variety of barriers in their library workplaces, from the physical environment to the lack of transparent communication. Yet this study also revealed that neurodivergent librarians employ their own learned expertise in navigating such challenges to improve their workplace experience, while neurodivergent supervisors are actively enacting that knowledge in ways that facilitate organizational change. Yet findings from this study also indicate that the labor and effort taken up by neurodivergent librarians to respond to their lack of workplace access comes with a cost that is added to the burden associated with the strong service-orientation of library work. In other words, the work of making library workplaces accessible and inclusive often falls to the individual because library work environments are designed and maintained in ways that exclude neurodivergent librarians.
My work, then, expands library and neurodiversity employment literature by drawing attention to the multi-dimensional aspects of neurodivergent people’s identities and by analyzing the impact of professional norms and expectations on the workplace experiences of neurodivergent librarians. Through the development of my approach to ‘centering neurodivergence,’ I also contribute a new research paradigm for future research on neurodiversity that upends normative assumptions and practices to honor neurodivergent ways of being researchers and doing research. Furthermore, this dissertation highlights the need to create library organizations that aren’t only serving patrons but are also enacting critical access and collective care within the workplace, thus honoring the core values of librarianship and increasing the capacity of libraries to recruit, onboard, retain, and advance neurodivergent librarians. As library workers are increasingly asked to defend the existence of libraries and the work of librarianship, addressing care injustice is vital so library work remains sustainable without further cost to neurodivergent librarians, and to everyone else in this field.