Fair foundations: ensuring epistemic justice in neurodiversity research and practice

The participation of neurodivergent employees can meaningfully enhance organizational effectiveness - but only when the research and practices that shape workplaces are built on accurate, community-grounded knowledge. This paper develops a perspective that epistemic justice, the recognition of individuals and communities as experts on their own experience, is both an ethical practice and, but a prerequisite for beneficial neurodiversity research and implementation. Epistemic injustice foundational framework that includes testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, this paper extends the concept to propose appropriative injustice, defined as the extraction of community knowledge without attribution or benefit. It further explores how testimonial, hermeneutical, and appropriative justice could operate across the full research-to-practice pipeline and offers concrete, stage-by-stage guidance for graduate educators, researchers, journal editors, practitioners, and organizational leaders who want their work to be both rigorous and just.