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.
The Global North paradigm I inherited excluded, segregated, and isolated — difference read as defective or shameful, with what Snyder and Mitchell call epistemicide carried out through eugenics, incarceration, and sterilization. The medicalization of difference as defect has colonial and capitalist dynamics inside it, not beside it.
Marium Akhund's work on decolonizing neurodiversity reorients this: honoring indigenous, ancestral, and ecological knowledge that embraced neurological diversity (Akhund, 2025). Hirota et al. (2024) document indigenous and non-Western cultures integrating and including neurodivergent individuals. The Neurodiversity Movement, Mad Pride, and Disability Justice collectives reclaimed language, autonomy, and political power (Brown, 2011; Berne, 2015).
Two of Akhund's reframings changed how I read a referral form. Demand avoidance and emotional sensitivity — PDA and RSD — are classed as dysfunction; resistance to external authority can also be read as spiritual protection or intuitive dissent, and those who resist control may be deeply attuned to social dynamics (Kirmayer et al., 2003; de Martino, 2005). And executive function "challenges" measured by urgency and Western linear time: clock-based time erases neurodivergent rhythms of presence and pacing (Mbiti, 1969; Cajete, 2000).
My school runs on bells. I have spent a year studying the hallway between them without once asking whose sense of time the bell encodes.
Evolution of thinking · revisited
What I thought then
Timeliness was a neutral professional norm and a reasonable expectation to hold students to.
What I think now
Clock time is a cultural artifact. Holding it as neutral means every student whose pacing differs starts each day already behind.
What changed my thinking
Akhund's argument that Western linear time erases rhythms of presence.