I, Misfit: Empty Fortresses, Social Robots, and Peculiar Relations in Autism Research

This publication is included in the Autistic Autism Scholarship Project. one author of this publication is identified as autistic in the project.

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Williams, R. & Philosophy Documentation Center (2021). I, Misfit: Empty Fortresses, Social Robots, and Peculiar Relations in Autism Research. In Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology (pp. 451-478). Philosophy Documentation Center. https://doi.org/10.5840/techne20211019147

Publication date: 1 Jan 2021 Added to AutiHub: 9 Aug 2026 Type: Book chapter Article language: English
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Authors

Publication authors
2
Publication authors identified as autistic
1 / 2 (50.0%)
  1. Rua M. Williams *
  2. Philosophy Documentation Center

Abstract

I draw upon Critical Disability Studies and Race Critical Code Studies to apply an oppositional reading of applied robotics in autism intervention. Roboticists identify care work as a prime legitimizing application for their creations. Popular imagination of robotics in therapeutic or rehabilitative contexts figures the robot as nurse or orderly. Likewise, the dominant narrative tropes of autism are robotic—misfit androids, denizens of the uncanny valley. Diagnostic measures reinforce tropes of autistic uncanniness: monotonous speech, jerky movements, and systematic, over-logical minds. Today, robots are pitched as therapeutic tools to intervene in the social (under)development of autistic children; robots with monotonous voices, jerky, dis-coordinated movements, unsettling affect, and behavior predicated on a system of finite state logic. I present eerie and uneasy connections between the discredited works on autism and selfhood by Bettelheim and contemporary rehabilitative robotics research and imagine possibilities for robotics to divest from legacies of enslavement and policing.

Bibliography cited by this reference

Cited references are imported from external metadata sources when they are available. The list may be partial.

Cited bibliography overview

These indicators describe the bibliography cited by this publication. An author name is counted each time it appears in one cited reference, so the same person can be counted more than once. Names not yet linked to an author already present in AutiHub are treated as unknown, not as non-autistic. Last computed: 2 Oct 2026 16:12.

Cited references
31
With a DOI
31
Without a DOI, from raw bibliography text
0
6 / 31 (19.4%) cited references include at least one author identified as autistic.
References with data to complete
1 / 31 (3.2%)
References with detected author names
31 / 31 (100.0%)
Without detected author names
0
Without a structured title
1
Without a stable identifier
0
References with raw author names still to review
0
References with external metadata lookup issues
1
These indicators apply to cited references displayed on this page, after technical duplicates have been merged. A reference without a DOI can still support author statistics when a title and author names are available.
Author names detected in the cited bibliography
103
From DOI or external metadata
103
From validated raw bibliography text
0
Raw names already validated
0
Raw names still to review
0
29 / 103 (28.2%) names are linked to an author already present in AutiHub. 74 / 103 (71.8%) names are not yet linked.
Names linked to a person identified as autistic
11 / 103 (10.7%)
Calculated across all author names detected in the cited bibliography. Among names linked to an author already present in AutiHub: 11 / 29 (37.9%). Distinct people identified as autistic: 9 / 100 (9.0%).
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