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

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Williams, A. & 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. Anna 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.

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These indicators describe the cited bibliography imported for this publication. Cited-reference metrics use the cited-reference total as denominator. Cited-author metrics state whether they use all cited-author occurrences or only occurrences linked to authors already integrated in the AutiHub database. They use cached links between cited authors and authors integrated in the AutiHub database. Last computed: 16 Aug 2026 11:31.

Cited references
31
Total cited references integrated for this publication.
Cited references with an identified autistic author
6 / 31 (19.4%)
Cited author occurrences identified as autistic
6 / 103 (5.8%)
Among occurrences linked to AutiHub author records: 6 / 26 (23.1%). Distinct cited authors identified as autistic: 4 / 100 (4.0%).
Cited author occurrences linked to AutiHub author records
26 / 103 (25.2%)
Distinct linked cited authors: 23 / 100 (23.0%)
Linked cited-author occurrences not identified as autistic
20 / 26 (76.9%)
Among linked cited-author occurrences only. Across all cited-author occurrences: 20 / 103 (19.4%). Distinct linked cited authors not identified as autistic: 19 / 23 (82.6%).
2 cited bibliography entries could not be fully enriched from DOI metadata.
Crossref: not found (1) · DataCite: not found (1)
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