Technological innovations are often recognized for improving accessibility, but are also critiqued for perpetuating exclusionary practices in disability research.In the context of neurodivergence, these tensions are intensified by its diverse and heterogeneous nature, alongside the continuously evolving understanding and awareness surrounding it.As tech startups act as catalysts for innovation, offering technological "solutions" that directly engage with the lived experiences of disabled individuals, a critical question arises: How do the discursive strategies used by these companies reflect and construct broader societal narratives surrounding neurodivergence?This study employs thematic and discourse analysis to examine the websites of 38 startups that claim to enhance the well-being of autistic people.Our analysis identifies three key thematic patterns in the corpus: fears, where startups emphasize urgency and evoke cultural anxieties; hopes, where they pin aspirations for empowerment and inclusion on technological innovation; and oscillations, where portrayals shift between different models of disability, allowing companies to address multiple audiences.These strategies not only influence how autism and care are publicly understood but also shape the design priorities, market logic, and ethical direction of disability-focused technologies.We call for greater attention to how language in disability tech participates in constructing the conditions of care and legitimacy in accessibility studies.

This paper examines the complex dynamics of shift assignment in agency-based home care settings, emphasizing the essential but overlooked role of care coordinators. Drawing on 18 qualitative interviews with home care aides and coordinators from three U.S. agencies, our findings reveal the work coordinators do to enable the aide-client relationships at the heart of home care. Coordinators act as both logisticians and matchmakers, trying to meet the needs of their clients with a limited and ever-changing pool of aides, all of whom have their own unique identities and needs. To do so, they draw on their own relationships with aides and other coordinators. Home care management software assists coordinators, but it cannot function without the social infrastructure they help to maintain. This study challenges the current focus of both technology designers and researchers, advocating for a perspective that recognizes the importance of relationships in home care and the interdependence of aides, clients, and coordinators.

Past CSCW work has examined the role of temporal rhythms in cooperative work and has identified alignment work--the work required to bring dissonant rhythms into alignment--as an important aspect of large-scale collaboration. We ask instead how individual workers interact with temporal rhythms to sustain the conditions that make their work possible--not aligning rhythms, but attuning them. This paper draws on interviews with farmer-knowledge workers, people who engage with both farm work (the work of growing food or raising animals for food, on a commercial or non-commercial basis) and computer-based knowledge work. We identify three ways that farmer-knowledge workers interact with natural and structural rhythms to construct sustainable work-lives: anchoring (tying oneself to a particular rhythm to create accountability and structure), decoupling (loosening or cutting ties with a rhythm to create flexibility), and gap-filling (interweaving complementary rhythms to create balance). Together, these practices constitute attunement work.

Recent years have seen increased investment in data-driven farming through the use of sensors (hardware), algorithms (software), and networking technologies to guide decision making. By analyzing the discourse of 34 startup company websites, we identify four future visions promoted by data-driven farming startups: the vigilant farmer who controls all aspects of her farm through data; the efficient farmer who has optimized his farm operations to be profitable and sustainable; the enlightened farmer who achieves harmony with nature via data-driven insights; and the empowered farmer who asserts ownership of her farm's data, and uses it to benefit herself and her fellow farmers. We describe each of these visions and how startups propose to achieve them. We then consider some consequences of these visions; in particular, how they might affect power relations between the farmer and other stakeholders in agriculture--farm workers, nonhumans, and the technology providers themselves.

Drawing from fieldwork of 14 small food farms in the Midwest, we describe the on-the-ground, practical challenges of doing and communicating sustainability when local food production is not well-supported. We illustrate how farmers enact learned and honed tactics of sustainability at key sites such as farmers' markets and the Internet with consumers. These tactics reveal tensions with dominant discourse from government, Big Ag, and popular culture. The success of these tactics depends on farmers having fortitude--control, resilience, and the wherewithal to be exemplars of sustainability. In our discussion, we highlight how the local farmers' social movement work constitutes loosely organized small groups connecting others to an amorphous idea of a sustainable society--one that sustains an environmental, economic, local, cultural, and physical way of life. Using Fine's concept of tiny publics, we identify design opportunities for supporting this less directed kind of social movement.