Inclusion as a process based on reciprocity, overcoming the paternalist model of inclusion in favour of a true cohabitation among the differences that make up our society, which guarantees the individual rights of self-representation and self-determination in a professional environment of the marginalized groups.
These were the key topics of the speech that I delivered last Tuesday during the presentation of the work of Specialisterne at the Dynamo Academy, which took place during the Festival de Desarrollo Sostenible. Dynamo Academy is a social enterprise that emerges from the values of the Dynamo Camp, and that for fiveteen years has been supporting young people, leaders, and more organizations on the chase of a common improvement, social innovation, and iniciatives related to sustainability.
In this context, it was particularly important that both I and the speaker that preceded my intervention, Maria Grazia Zedda, Diversity & Inclusion Manager for the enterprise HS2 and a person with disability, emphatically stressed the importance of the social model of disability. It is a model that can also be applied to neurodiversity, and which liberates the neurodivergent and disabled person from having to withstand the weight of what is too often a vertical process of inclusion, in which they have no voice.
The image that too often comes with diversity also when it refers to bodies, minds and senses of people, is one that tends to represent anything that deviates from the average as inferior, as something to be repaired. Many times we conceive of disability as an attribute of the person, and we try to fix what we perceive as an imperfection, a deficit.
The social model, created in the seventies by people with disabilities – proposed by those who experience exclusion at first hand from certain environments of exclusion– clarifies that one thing is the physical, cognitive, and sensory characteristics of a person (that can become problematic in some cases) and another one is the concept of disability that emerges when someone with specific characteristics clashes with barriers (be it physical, sensorial, psychological, social, etc), that a society built around an image of an ideal human being puts in between.
It is precisely in this context where Specialisterne comes in, in trying to eliminate the barriers that are constantly present in the working environment, a world full of processes and situations that are very standardized, and as a consequence not always accessible to people with characteristics that move away from the average, such as autistic people. Because training and preparing the autistic person to enter into the professional environment is of no use if all of this environment is not capable of understanding the autistic functioning and positively value their traits.
Reciprocity of the inclusion process oriented towards the idea of cohabitation in which differences are a source for opportunities, reciprocity because inclusion as a process is not a one-way process , but needs to be two-way . We need to understand each other’s world without judging it, but looking at what is less known as an opportunity for personal and professional growth.
And within this reciprocal process of cohabitation, also in the company, listening is essential. We should never take for granted what an autistic person might need, same as we shouldn’t for neurotypicals. Because we autistic people are all different, just like everybody else. It is impossible to have professional inclusion without a relation of equality, in which marginalized and excluded people decide the terms of their own inclusion.
Only in these terms inclusion can represent a real advantage for all: for the autistic person, for the company that will benefit from teams with different talents, different visions, and as an extension for all of the society, because at the end of the day we will be able to apply this cohabitation and this richness to our homes, daily lives, and the whole world.
(Fabrizio Acanfora, autistic person, responsible of Communication and External Relations of Specialisterne Italia)
(Text translated by Gerard Glas from Specialisterne Spain)