“Neurodiversity at Work in Multilateral Humanitarian Organisations”

Josephine Go Jefferies

Newcastle University Business School

Director of the Northern Ireland and North East (NINE) Doctoral Training Partnership

Bio & Abstract: Dr Josephine Go Jefferies is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Newcastle University Business School in the UK. Her research programme focuses on the role that digital services play in consumer health and well-being. With expertise in telehealth services for patient self-management of chronic conditions, her work has considered the experiences of patients and healthcare professionals managing cardiovascular disease, chronic pulmonary disease, and diabetes. More recently, her work has focused on studying how invisible variations in cognitive and sensory processes (including autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and other forms of neurodiversity) affect well-being. By employing sociological approaches to consider the various forms of consumer work involved in being well, she encourages others to reimagine how sociotechnical marketing practices can be made more inclusive. She argues that by conceptualising how consumers reflect and respond to the marginalising conditions they experience, we can transform service designs to amplify the opportunities and affordances that are critical for well-being outcomes. In presenting some of the preliminary findings from her current research project with two United Nations agencies, which studies neurodiversity at work in multilateral humanitarian organisations, Josephine hopes to stimulate discussion about the prospects for neurodiversity as an enabler of global health and human development.