In 2019, when I began conducting research on neurodiversity and aging in India at the cusp of an emergent pandemic, I never thought that professional work would eventually become a focus of my research concerning care. In that moment, nobody knew how fundamentally the pandemic would lay bare the precarity of neurodiverse households, as caregivers unexpectedly passed away with no contingencies in place for their neurodivergent relatives. Therefore, work as a daily routine, a separate place from home and school, and the world of professional relations, seemed far off from my research horizons on neurodivergent adulthood. As an anthropologist of care, then, I struggled to envision workplaces as spaces of care for and with neurodivergent individuals.

However, as existing research already showcases, many neurodivergent adults with higher support needs in undertaking daily tasks, spend a significant portion of their day at home with their families in India. In these homes, finding out work opportunities for a neurodivergent relative repeatedly emerges as a moral commitment that might turn the tide of a loved one’s fate towards a more meaningful future.

For instance, the sibling caregiver in her late twenties in Delhi who I met early on in my research reflected on the unique challenges of simultaneously being a young caregiver and working professional. Her younger, autistic brother spent most of his time with their grandfather with minimal access to the outside world. Even as a proxy caregiver, she was struggling to figure out how to plan his daily schedule at home. Without any formal training in special education or psychology, she started spending her weekends devising a work system that could introduce new skills, aspirations, and routines in his life, like painting diyas and beading bracelets. In this neurodiverse household, a young caregiver struggles to ensure that her brother is not left behind while being at such a crucial age in her own career. 

More recently, I met another sibling in his teens who showed me his personal diary when I asked him about his future plans. Instead of harbouring secrets about school bullies or crushes, the diary held ideas and thorough background research about building initiatives that could showcase neurodivergent talent in all fields. As an elder sibling to a younger brother with an intellectual disability, he remains committed to crafting something sustainable in the field of disability and the arts. 

For many siblings and familial caregivers in neurodiverse households, then, seeking one’s own professional success as an individuated goal is simply not an option. While aging simultaneously, neurodiverse siblings especially face the moral pressure of ensuring that their milestones of adulthood, from getting one’s first paycheck to finding close friends, are aligned. To ensure this alignment of life courses, accessible work opportunities can offer an unparalleled avenue across the spectrum of neurodiversity. Opening a whole new world of relations and routines beyond parentally mediated settings, professional expectations and contexts, when accessibly envisaged, can be deeply enabling spaces for neurodiverse flourishing. Therefore, despite their limiting experiences of and at work, many siblings, parents, and other caregivers consistently search for sustainable work opportunities for and with their neurodivergent relatives. 

Beyond familial homes, who is creating and sustaining spaces of work for neurodivergent individuals? I got the privilege to spend time at a range of vocational programs for neurodivergent individuals across Delhi that operate out of special schools, day care centers, assisted living homes, and training institutes. The vocational programs in these spaces emerged as a response to the boredom, isolation, and neglect of neurodivergent adults in familial and educational settings. Acting as both sheltered and transitionary work environments, vocational programs for neurodivergent adults become the testing grounds to actualize a more inclusive work culture for all. Most significantly, however, vocational programs are a site for enacting newer modes of communicating and, therefore, relating with one another for both neurodivergent and neurotypical colleagues. Lived insights from such programs can provide an essential framework in ensuring greater employability of neurodivergent individuals across work sectors. 

In these programs, when neurotypical trainers share instructions with neurodivergent team members about a task at hand, the most relevant information is communicated in an encouraging and multimodal manner. For instance, while asking a colleague to move an object from one spot to another, prompts are given but not only verbally. Rather, the usage of visual signs and hand gestures allows for the same task to be comprehended smoothly by some neurodivergent colleagues. Moreover, neurodivergent adults are much more likely to experience infantilizing relations where their choices are constantly policed in an outrightly restrictive manner.

Acknowledging this lived experience, many programs and trainers attempt not to use “no” as a definitive command in everyday communication. In such enabling spaces, then, neurodivergent adults get to be addressed as fellow team members and working individuals who are no longer stuck as students in educational contexts or as children at home. 

Ensuring greater employability for neurodivergent adults in India is a diverse, promising, and underfunded domain. Family members are deeply invested in exploring pathways to dignified adulting for their neurodivergent loved ones. Special educators, social workers, and job coaches get to expand their skills while working with neurodivergent adults as close observers and access-building officers. Finally, neurodivergent adults themselves aspire to experience adulting through work opportunities that nudge them into newer communities of support and obligation.

Therefore, as workplaces take on the responsibility of ensuring accessibility for the neurodivergent workforce, they expand the aspirational horizons of more than just one stakeholder.

In bridging neurodiversity and employability, then, workplaces must acknowledge that neurodiversity is not just an employable option that exists beyond the office and at home or in institutions. Rather, neurodiversity is a constitutive condition of our humanity that already exists in workplaces, waiting to be affirmatively acknowledged and concertedly supported.

Paras (they/them/theirs) is a neuroqueer anthropologist, artist, and writer from Delhi who critically studies neurodiversity, family life, care work, and future planning in India. They are a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in socio-cultural and medical anthropology at Stanford University.