Making "human" exclusionary: Social forms and ableist language in the computing professions

Ableism – i.e., an analytic term for societal exclusion of people who "look different" (e.g., talk, move, communicate differently) from an "average" or "normal" person, is a latecomer  to social justice attention. Critical analyses of racism and sexism preceded it, and have helped to stimulate significant, though incomplete, reforms via legal and other culture-change mechanisms (e.g., TV show casting.)  Correlatively, sexism-(and racism)-in-language have been fertile, richly-harvested fields (e,g,, Pascale, 2007), whereas ableism-in-language has barely achieved recognition by activists (e.g. the anti-"R.word" movement), or scholars (e.g., Ferri and Connor, 2005; Cherney,  2011) . This paper plumbs the heritage of the former analyses, while highlighting differences in the societal context of ableism that affect how language marginalizes/excludes people with disabilities (PwDs)..

             Analysts, seminal and recent, have shown that "isms" in language operate variously on cognitive processes, but they often do not specify the social structural links (Kramer et al., 1978, Miller & James, 2009)   The current paper identifies a large, culturally-influential globalized occupational sphere (broadly, Computer Design) to explore how social organization and linguistic practices interact to impact PwDs in the targeted professions and society-at-large. Using descriptive analysis of online professional discourse and organizational structure, I show how the term "Human" is used restrictively, a process buttressed by other terms ("assistive [technology]", "suffer", "normal/average person") and is built into social structure via formation and naming of professional specialties (journals, conferences, etc.). Finally, I outline the socio-economic consequences of this marginalizing process. The focal site is the multinational professional society, Association for Computing Machinery,  particularly its longstanding "Special Interest Group-SIG" on Computer-Human Interface, and its newer SIG on Accessibility (for PwDs).

             My core theoretical concepts derive from Bourdieu's symbolic power (1991), Foucault 's "normativity" (Comstack, 2008) and Bowker/Star 's classification (2000).

(Full references on request)