Rights are granted after a fight. Justice transforms.

The more I researched, the more I wanted to understand the difference between rights and justice. My fledgling EdD (lowercase edd) thoughts are that rights seem to be provided, given, granted — but only after a fight, and only by the dominant power. Justice is deeper, transformative. Freire, Foucault, and Bakhtin all point to meaningful dialogue — discussion, seeing multiple perspectives — as essential to moving forward, the only way toward becoming more human.

I see the arc as: the dominant power allowing something to evolve while remaining the dominant power (disability rights) → a movement led by people living at the intersection of multiple forms of oppression (disability justice) → self-advocacy and empowerment through neurodiverse voices as experts, like the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. I realized that neurodivergent rights have evolved — but neurodivergent justice has transformed. That has to be our goal: to truly transform the foundations of power and knowledge and being human.

Shaun Grech's work on disability and colonialism sharpened this for me. In "Recolonising debates or perpetuated coloniality?" he argues that much of the knowledge about disability and neurodiversity comes from the Global North, not from the voices of the Global South. The concern: who controls how we view both the research and the discussion of what it means to exist as a neurodiverse human in the world? What perspectives are missing?