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.
The brief was a history. What I built was an argument: that neurodiversity is not a clinical category that softened over time, but a political tool that advocates took away from clinicians. Kassiane Asasumasu named neurodivergence. Harvey Blume wrote about neurological pluralism. Judy Singer named neurodiversity. None of them were writing a diagnosis.
Assembling it in order — Itard, Bleuler, Kanner, Buck v. Bell, Asperger, the refrigerator mother hypothesis, Rimland, Lovaas, PARC and Mills, IDEA, Sinclair, Wing, Crenshaw, Lomax, Hamer, Galloway, InLv, Grandin, Williams, Akhund — made the shape visible. Every era located the problem inside a person until the people themselves published.
The part I did not expect was the positionality slide. I am a white 55-year-old woman writing about a movement whose most important recent work is being done by neurodivergent people of color. That is not a disclaimer at the end of the presentation. It is a constraint on the design of everything I do next.
Related journal entries
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A microaggression is something a student hears. A micro-assumption is the thing I believed a half-second before I opened my mouth. This entry is about well-meaning white adults — me included — and the daily arithmetic of small guesses that adds up to a mountain a student has to climb alone.
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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.
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Women have been socialized to cook and to listen for millennia. That was the family structure I grew up in. I did not find my voice until after forty — really after fifty — and it was not easy.
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The history of neurodiversity is not one line. There is a parallel pathway bubbling up underneath it — intersectionality — and I cannot tell the first story honestly without it.
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Jim Sinclair and Lorna Wing changed what I think a diagnosis is. And I have to admit that a small part of me grieved when my own child was diagnosed.
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A layer of shared knowledge, community, and communication that changed who could be heard — and who stopped being alone.
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Early in the research it was clear whose voices carried. I am trying not to judge — I just wonder.
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Where I stand shapes what I can see. And I would like us to retire the word neurotypical.
- What I first thought · I learned that · I wonder if
The prompt I gave the room at the end of the presentation, and the norms question I want every adult in a school to sit with.
- From "othered" to included: the words came before the science
Neurodivergence and neurodiversity are not two names for the same thing. One asks what is wrong with this person. The other asks what is wrong with the room.
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Itard believed empathy and language separated men from beasts. Ninety years later the Supreme Court decided Carrie Buck's rights did not matter. The same logic runs through both.
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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.
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My fledgling EdD (lowercase edd) thought: neurodivergent rights have evolved — but neurodivergent justice has transformed. Transformation has to be the goal.
- "Not an appendage": the year the subject started writing
Jim Sinclair's 1993 essay reframed a sentence parents said constantly, and I have not been able to unhear it.
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Brad Lomax, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Donald Galloway did not treat disability rights and racial justice as adjacent causes. My own coursework had.
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Before InLv and Autistics.org, many neurodivergent people lived in deep isolation and the true population ratio was simply unknown.
- 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.
- Norms around us: the exercise I could not answer cleanly about my own building
I asked the room to name two or three norms at their workplace that might exclude someone with a different neurocognitive style. Then I had to answer it myself.