Theme

Decolonizing knowledge

Global North paradigms of deficit, and the Global South paradigms that never accepted them.

Journal entries

Sep 10, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Recorded presentation · Draft 1

First draft: telling the history of neurodiversity out loud

A recorded walk-through of the history of neurodiversity. This is a first draft, not a finished piece — I am posting it so the revisions have something to revise.

Aug 31, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 20–22

Two paradigms: fix the person, or hold the person

The world seems to divide along cultural paradigms about what neurodivergence means — and the older paradigm was never the deficit one.

Aug 30, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slide 19

The loudest voices were not the lived ones

Early in the research it was clear whose voices carried. I am trying not to judge — I just wonder.

Aug 28, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, decolonizing neurodiversity

Not broken — differently attuned

Two constructs at odds: a Global North paradigm that medicalized difference as defect, and Global South paradigms that had already integrated it.

Aug 25, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, postwar psychology

Blame the mothers, then ask whose voices are missing

After WWII the cause of autism shifted from biological to psychological — and landed squarely on mothers. Rimland pushed back. But the voices I found first were all white, male, and old.

Aug 25, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, the shift that reorganized my thinking

Rights are granted after a fight. Justice transforms.

My fledgling EdD (lowercase edd) thought: neurodivergent rights have evolved — but neurodivergent justice has transformed. Transformation has to be the goal.

Milestones

Fall 2026 · Presentation

Week 6 · History and evolution of neurodiversity as a concept and political tool

A co-presentation with Diana Gaukel for EDOC 7120, Global Histories and Politics in Education — and the first assignment that changed my research question rather than answered it.

Open questions

live

Who is writing the history of neurodiversity, and who is being written about?

Projects

EDOC 7120 · Global Histories and Politics in Education · Fall 2026 · Week 6

History and Evolution of Neurodiversity as a Concept and Political Tool

A co-presentation with Diana Gaukel tracing neurodiversity from 18th-century institutionalization through Buck v. Bell, IDEA, and the self-advocacy movement, into decolonizing critiques and present-day school practice — closing with positionality and a norms exercise for the room.

Reading & influences

Article · Akhund

On older, non-Western understandings of neurological difference

Reminded me that acceptance is not the new idea. Medicalization is. Communities have held neurodivergent people with reverence for as long as there have been humans; the deficit paradigm is a recent import.

Article · Marium Akhund, PhD, licensed psychotherapist

Decolonizing neurodiversity

Reframed demand avoidance as intuitive dissent and clock-based time as an erasure of neurodivergent pacing. It made me look at my building's bell schedule as a cultural artifact rather than a neutral container.