Abstract
The concept of neurodiversity has gained wide recognition in mainstream society within the past two decades. As it is now increasingly used in education and clinical settings, its original meaning, which comes from grassroots neurodivergent activism, has been skewed. While initially coined to reclaim the cultural and political dimensions of the neurodivergent experience, moving away from pathologization and deficit-based narratives found in widely used clinical texts like the DSM-V, so-called experts have co-opted the term. These medicalizing discourses and regulatory practices stem from the ideology of White supremacy, the settler colonial structure, and a capitalist system that bolsters the productive, neoliberal citizen archetype. Neurodivergent peoples’ bodyminds disrupt this archetype and what it represents in terms of medicalizing discourses that separate ideal citizens from deficient ones. Feeling threatened, professionals—who reinforce this power relation by administering treatment and intervention—adopt harmful strategies, including separating neurodivergence from disability, to reclaim and legitimize their expertise. Our work examines how the concept of neurodiversity is used to mobilize these strategies and how they impact neurodivergent people seeking affirming care, resources, and community. Drawing from social media and other online resources, we use testimonios and storytelling to analyze the for-profit misappropriation and rebranding of neurodivergent liberatory practices. We then juxtapose these with examples of neurodivergent counter-narratives to illustrate creative forms of resilience. To close, we offer recommendations to professionals who intend to address and re-orient these practices toward harm reduction and, eventually, to support collective liberation.
Community Brief
Why is this topic important?
Neurodiversity refers to the fact that all brains are created differently. People whose brains are different from the majority refer to themselves as neurodivergent and fight together to make decisions for themselves and celebrate their culture. These activists started meeting online in the 90s and created the Neurodiversity Movement.
Now that more people are using the word Neurodiversity, we are concerned that many use it in ways that do not match the community’s hopes for their lives. Instead, we recognize they are causing harm with negative messages that separate neurodivergence from disability. Another concern is that service professionals, like therapists and special educators, are using the word to show they are experts who can be trusted to provide care that respects neurodivergent people’s hopes and needs. These claims can be dishonest and sometimes dangerous. Other professionals say that the Neurodiversity Movement is inauthentic and excludes most people, except for those wrongfully labeled “high functioning.” This is untrue and harmful because aside from ignoring people’s lived experiences of disability, it also divides members of a community working for similar goals.
What is the purpose of this article?
Committed to supporting neurodivergent people in various contexts, we introduce three ideas:
how service professionals misuse neurodivergent grassroots perspectives; concerns about harms that come with unfair uses of neurodivergent practices; and recommendations for supporting authentic neurodivergent practices.
Our research method uses story-telling and collective protest against practices that disregard what neurodivergent people know and claim about themselves. We highlight troublesome examples of people using neurodiversity online and on social media and we explain how these uses harm the community.
What personal and professional perspectives did the authors bring?
We are two disabled educators and disability studies scholars who are affected by sexism and racism but also hold privilege as people with degrees and a middle-class lifestyle. One of us is a brown neurodivergent woman living with chronic illness, and the other is a white, physically disabled woman and a wheelchair user.
Following Disability Justice, we notice and act against negative ideas about race, socioeconomic status, citizenship, and other oppressive systems that affect disability communities. We recognize that the content of our work is limited to the United States, which excludes the large majority of the world’s disabled population and their opinions about this work.
What is already known about this topic?
Neurodiversity means that all brains are wired differently and that not one brain is better or healthier. There is disagreement between service professionals, such as therapists and educators, parents, and neurodivergent activists, about this. While most professionals and parents believe neurodivergence is a problem to fix or a superpower to hone, many neurodivergent people affirm it as a disabled identity and a way of life associated with cultural and political practices and beliefs.
Professionals and parents have had the upper hand in deciding what services, resources, education, and familial and community involvement are best for their children. This has resulted in an unbalanced power relationship and has disadvantaged neurodivergent people, their autonomy, and decision-making in all aspects of their lives. The Neurodiversity Movement has resisted ideas and practices that misrepresent their lived experiences.
What do the authors recommend?
We offer recommendations for addressing the problems described above:
Within Organizations
Neurodivergent Leadership: We recommend that professionals interested in supporting Neurodiversity act accordingly to require leadership or, at minimum, meaningful input from neurodivergent people. Caution of Charity: Often, disability is seen as a tragedy. This idea spreads through charity and uninvited “acts of kindness.” It is important to know that this can make people feel like they are a problem and owe their well-being to this kindness. It is also important to remember that neurodivergent people are creative and bold in rejecting unsolicited “help.”
Teaching and Research
Firsthand Experience: We ask educators to highlight neurodivergent people and their first-hand experiences (including language, identity, and symbols of choice) instead of looking to others who claim to be experts. Using first-hand experience promotes the autonomy of neurodivergent people in the community, helping professionals recognize the limits of textbook knowledge as it excludes neurodivergent experience. In learning these limits, professionals learn to value neurodivergent ideas and support the community’s motto – Nothing About Us Without Us! – in their research, teaching, and service.
How will these recommendations help autistic adults now or in the future?
Neurodivergent leadership ensures communities’ needs and goals are fulfilled according to their political beliefs and cultural practices. Self-affirming statements will support shifts in perspective and action against violence. Changes in professionals’ engagement with neurodivergent communities improves practice and services, promoting affirmative care.
Introduction
Akin to biodiversity, the term Neurodiversity refers to the biological fact that all brains are wired differently. The concept of neurological diversity emerged in the mid-1990s from collective online conversations among autistic activist communities and was later popularized through the published works of Harvey Bloom and Judy Singer. These autistic online activist communities and their leaders, including Jim Sinclair and Martjin Dekker, the founder of the Independent email list where these conversations originated, laid the foundation for a new social movement. 1 This Neurodiversity Movement has revolutionized how we understand neurological diversity as an integral part of the human experience rather than pathology, making space for political reclamation from clinical oversight and labeling practices such as those propagated in the DSM-V.
With commitments to supporting neurodivergent people’s bodymind autonomy and decision-making power in everyday familial, cultural, educational, policy, and legal contexts, the focus of this paper is trifold: 1. an understanding of how grassroots perspectives are often co-opted, repackaged, and misused by healthcare and other applied professionals, often with charitable intentions and for-profit motives; 2. an identification of harms resulting from the cultural appropriation and misapplication of neurodivergent grassroots knowledge and identity reclamation processes; and 3. recommendations for liberatory engagement, including ways to build genuine “neurodiversity-affirming” practices based on grassroots neurodivergent Testimonio, a feminist methodology, to uncover and resist systemic oppression.
Positionality
Our approach to this topic is rooted in our first-hand experience as disabled educators and critical disability studies scholars who are also gendered. One of us is a racialized neurodivergent woman living with chronic illness, and the other is a White, physically disabled woman who uses a wheelchair. Following the principles and practices of Disability Justice—we pay particular attention to how language and new meaning are constructed and weaponized against historically marginalized communities, particularly concerning the proliferation of professional discourses 1 around neurodivergence and bodymind difference.
More specifically, our interest and focus are on how language and discourse shape the way we think about ourselves and our embodied reality and, in turn, how our bodyminds internalize and perform those discourses in practice. For example, when I, Suzanne, was a child, another child with whom I was playing by the pool whispered to my ear that her mom said I was “sick.” From there on, I began to wonder how other people saw me and to question what was “wrong” with me. I internalized these thoughts and struggled with what others said about me versus my own perception of who I was, which meant that I had to try doubly hard to prove that I was not “sick” or “damaged” and to avoid talking about anything disability-related, which isolated me from disability community for a long time.
I, Sara, started going to therapy at an early age due to my difficulty regulating emotions, intense anxiety, and sensitivity. These sessions were mainly focused on my “lack” of control, “inability” to self-regulate, and intense responses to external stimuli. Rarely were external factors used to consider the significant role that sensory, environmental, social, and familiar elements played in affecting my responses. Years of this form of talk therapy pushed me to internalize feelings of “too muchness,” “intensity,” “high sensitivity,” “unavailability,” and “weakness.” These feelings pushed me to mask my emotions and many other aspects of myself (including passing and perfecting my accent to erase any trace of Spanish from it) in exchange for excelling in school, work, and my communities of practice to the point of debilitation and chronic illness.
From these perspectives, we are positioned to prioritize grassroots perspectives and, from there, develop a conceptual and contextual framework for unpacking the problem we have identified, the factors that are implicated in reproducing it, and the recommendations we propose to start shifting the current narrative and the practices that sustain it. Finally, it is crucial to note that our identities afford us many privileges as scholars living and working in the global North, where disability politics has followed a strong, positive trajectory. Within this context, we have experienced disability as a site of political and cultural liberation and an identity to celebrate. We acknowledge that this is not the case within the U.S. nation-state for hyper-marginalized communities in most parts of the world, where disability results from war, poverty, slow violence, and debilitation. 2 We depart, therefore, with the premise that our analysis is always already partial and limited to the boundaries of the U.S. nation-state.
Method
Our method aligns with our positionality as negatively racialized and gendered scholar-activists. As such, we use Testimonio feminista, drawing from LatCrit. 3 More specifically, we use our personal experiences and deep understanding of disability community dynamics and culture to offer testimonio—a feminist epistemology of protest and a collective narration of resistance to oppressive structures and practices systematically harming marginalized communities. This method allows us to gather, analyze, and interpret data found in public online archives and social media repositories to uncover often ignored systemic harms resulting from the misuse of grassroots knowledge. For instance, institutionally, modern psychiatry continues to hold an outdated, pathological view of neurodivergence, narrowly defining what it looks like according to a standardized manual and, thus, how it should manifest.4,5 This view disregards what neurodivergent people know and claim about themselves and how we embody this knowledge, often robbing us of decision-making power, bodymind autonomy, and community. We will return to this point in a later section.
Our experiences as scholars of critical disability studies strive to challenge and disrupt these systems and practices as a form of resistance to non-disabled expertise. Our objective is to curate and direct the reader through this material by employing conceptual and theoretical frameworks from critical disability studies and the Neurodiversity Movement in alignment with the liberatory principles and practices of Disability Justice, such as anti-capitalism, cross-movement organizing, and collective access.
Problem
As the concept of neurodiversity continues to gain recognition in education, clinical settings, and the public sphere, a benevolent excitement ensnared in liberal whiteness, and a feel-good mentality moves people to promote unexamined discourses and practices as transformative. These unexamined discourses lead to the misappropriation and rebranding of grassroots liberatory practices, undoing the essence of their meaning. Since its entry into more mainstream discourse in the early 2000s, service professionals have laid claim to the concept of neurodiversity, which is conceived differently from how neurodivergent activists intended. For example, neurodivergent activists coined the term to explain that all brains are wired differently and that not one brain functions better or is superior to another. This concept is understood along with the fact that the human experience is neurodiverse; in other words, all brains differ.
U.S. environments and cultural practices have been established around normative ideologies undergirded by legacies of settler colonialism, White supremacy, anti-Black racism, and capitalist exploitation. Settler colonialism is when a group invades and seizes control of territory to violently replace existing people, their culture, and their social structure with their own.6,7 A tool of settler colonialism, White supremacy is a prevailing ideology that asserts the superiority of the White race, forming the basis of social, economic, political, and cultural systems and structures that uphold racist practices as fundamental to the functioning of the nation-state. 8 In the U.S. context, settler colonial structures and White supremacist ideology have led to particularly heinous anti-Black practices, including the Transatlantic slave trade, Jim Crow, police brutality, the overrepresentation of Black students in special education, the militarization of schools, the school-to-prison pipeline, mass incarceration, among others.9,10
Both White supremacy and anti-Black racism are essential for the perpetuation of global capitalism—a free-market economic system that relies on the exploitation of historically marginalized workers to sustain itself. One of its iterations is neoliberalism, a system that has significantly reduced restrictions on market trade and encouraged state divestment from social programs, promoting it as a move toward increased individualism and freedom. This system favors an ideal human archetype, typically portrayed as White, cisheterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class, and male, to symbolize the ideal consumer/producer citizen. Neurodivergent embodiment and expression conflict and disrupt this archetype by actively escaping normative expectations, thus threatening the role of experts—clinicians, special educators, and school psychologists in administering “therapeutic” assimilation. 11
Given the challenge, professionals in healthcare and other service sectors have adopted strategies, posing as transgressive and progressive, to reclaim their authority and reinforce their expertise in overseeing disability.1,12–14 Our analysis examines how neurodiversity is being co-opted and widely misused under false pretenses to attract neurodivergent people seeking affirming care, previously inaccessible resources, and neurodiversity-informed work environments. The following are some examples of this phenomenon found online via Google search:
Example 1: Clinical co-optation
One criterion for identifying clinical co-option is the use of neurodiversity-affirming language while maintaining pathologizing conceptions and practices. This indicates that their language and intention are not aligned.
In this LinkedIn article titled “How to Find a Neurodiversity-Affirming Therapist,” 15 we observe the first example of how clinical providers co-opt neurodiversity language, yet their affirming messages remain rooted in diagnostic labels largely rejected by the Movement, such as “Autism Spectrum Disorder” and “neuropsychological testing.” 15 Other indicators of co-optation include a focus on an expected parental audience and an erasure of neurodivergent adults, as well as a misconception and misunderstanding of the very concept of neurodiversity in sentences such as “… receive recommendations to support your child at home” 15 and “finding a therapist who understands the unique needs of the neurodiverse community, can be difficult.” 15 (para1) While these professionals attempt to use what they perceive as a cool new language, their use of the form “neurodiverse community” referring to neurodivergent people only illustrates their lack of knowledge of the various aspects that inform neurodiversity as a multifaceted experience at a human, group, and individual level.
Example 2: The marketization of neurodiversity
Another criterion for identifying misuse of neurodiversity is when language and practices that claim to support the neurodivergent community are, in fact, performative and exploitative. ServeSkills Elearning, 16 a diversity training service for companies and organizations, has a website that displays content titled “Neurodiversity at Work Training Series: Supporting Neurodivergent Colleagues and Costumers.” Although the general population might interpret this kind of training as a positive DEI step toward integration, what we observe here is the branding of neurodiversity through a benevolent marketing strategy. This strategy, however, promises to handle the “challenge to work alongside people who think, communicate, or behave in ways we’re not used to.”16 (para2) Again, this indicates an expected audience of non-neurodivergent people, reinforcing the normalcy narrative that traditionally dichotomizes the human experience into us versus them language.
The marketization of neurodiversity 17 endorses capitalism, ableism, White supremacy, settler colonialism, and other forms of domination. As we argued previously, neurodivergent embodiment and expression often defy neuronormativity and the systems, structures, and practices within which it thrives. In particular, Capitalism operates on a narrow definition and expectation of human productivity and functionality, which is then used to sort skilled and unskilled labor. Markedly, disability studies literature has demonstrated how eugenic medical designations such as “imbecile, moron, and feebleminded” 18 were ascribed following labor capacity and assumed productivity levels. The resemblance of how functioning labels such as “high” and “low” functioning are similarly ascribed in contemporary contexts is striking. For instance, dichotomous stereotypes such as the autistic savant—a highly intelligent and capable person of great talent—and the profound autistic—often believed to be a self-injurious, non-speaking, incapable, dependent person—still play a crucial role in recruitment and hiring today. 19
This can be seen in how companies’ exploitative recruitment strategies include aggressively seeking and recruiting neurodivergent workers, particularly autistic people, to serve high markers of productivity and capital accumulation, playing on the savant stereotype, while engaging in performative DEI campaigns. 20 This exemplifies why the Neurodiversity Movement takes on an anti-capitalist politics in line with Disability Justice.
While we recognize the prevalence of these oppressive narratives and practices in mainstream media, it is vital to amplify the creative forms of resilience and liberatory counter-narratives deployed by neurodivergent activists and scholars. For example, in contrast to the first example, Neurodivergent Counseling Services-Radically Neurodivergent-Affirming Care, 15 led by a queer neurodivergent therapist, offers a distinctly different approach to the definition of neurodiversity, by avoiding pathologizing language and providing a description of services framed by a well-versed understanding of neurodivergent cultural practices.
Another example responds directly to marketing strategies claiming to support neurodivergent activists while profiting from their emerging visibility in the public arena. Enright 17 warns against organizations that claim association with historically marginalized people and their movements toward liberation for financial gain or virtue signaling—a strategy often known as performative allyship. 21
Aside from the false connections some non-disabled people make for profit, others are misusing neurodiversity as a way of distancing from disability, making it “more palatable.” Now that the term is rapidly spreading in our social and cultural discourse, it is common to find messaging and symbolism referencing the idea of neurodiversity as a strength, certainly a welcome shift given the many forms of abuse and neglect people marked with labels currently associated with neurodivergence have experienced. The making of neurodiversity into a “superpower,” however, unfairly drives expectations of high achievement associated with the pressures of hyper-productivity, compulsory able-bodiedness, 22 and other capitalist values. The distancing of neurodivergence from disability has cascading consequences. We identify at least three here. 1) It unintentionally negates access needs. This is due to the social pressure to remain separate from “those” people, which makes it difficult to acknowledge sensory and other barriers associated with one’s neurodivergent embodiment; 2) It disregards the inherent value of disabled people. By celebrating neurodivergence, in opposition to disability, clinicians and educators validate alternative brain wiring as socially acceptable and full of potential while simultaneously sending a message about disability as undesirable. 23 This is a new, more tacit way of marking what has been long labeled “low” and “high” human functioning according to clinical assessments. 3) This messaging also severs the potential for companionship—a form of political solidarity committed to active struggle and horizontal organizing. 24 The epitome of political companionship is the Disability Justice Movement, which has strengthened coalitional politics within disability communities by applying principles such as cross-disability organizing and collective access, bolstering the struggle against systemic ableism, racism, capitalism, and other forms of oppression.
Because historically marginalized communities represent an existential threat to the fiction of sameness, social forces such as racism and ableism, and the settler colonial influences such as the normalcy narrative—deeply ingrained in the public imagination and powerful in their reach—thwart political companionship. A concrete example of this phenomenon is the way service professionals such as clinicians and educators reproduce the normalcy narrative through a privileged critique that positions them in a place of superiority to determine who is and is not reason-able, capable, or autonomous, thus questioning the legitimacy of multiply marginalized disabled peoples’ leadership and self-liberation efforts. Medical professionals like Manuel Casanova, a neurologist, posit that many leaders of the Neurodiversity Movement are actually non-autistic people posing as autistic, have created a hierarchy and positioned themselves at the top, claiming to represent those who cannot represent themselves. Referring to “high” and “low” functioning labels, he notes, “The only thing they have accomplished is the creation of a split in the autism community that allows for themselves and nobody else…Neurodiversity is a social club where many of its participants are non-autistic individuals claiming to be autistic.” 23
Claims such as Casanova’s are consistent with the views of Nazi sympathizers such as Hans Asperger. Asperger was an Austrian psychiatrist who, in 1944, introduced the concept of “high” and “low” functioning categories to categorize autistic children who could be discarded and murdered and those who could potentially be saved. He was integral in the lineage of behaviorists involved in manufacturing Autism as an object of clinical study and medical experimentation.
This particular claim carries professional weight amongst clinicians, further harming gendered, racialized, and otherwise marginalized autistic people whose neuro-expression does not fit the traditional diagnostic criteria of Autism. 25 The pathological markers behaviorists like Asperger identified are still currency in widely used publications such as the DSM-V and are being weaponized to cause fractures within the autistic community. Other claims from non-disabled clinicians assert that the Neurodiversity Movement is harmful and detrimental to select segments of the community and that “only a narrow conception of neurodiversity, referring exclusively to high-functioning autists, is reasonable.” 26 (p. 20)
Contrary to the above claims, neurodivergent activists and scholars have been clear in their claims to disability identity, having long understood how dehumanizing and totalizing high and low-functioning labels are. Therefore, it should be noted that clinicians often conflate disability and disorder/impairment, lacking a true understanding of the political nature of the embodied experience of disability.
And so, it seems that blank statements such as Jaarsma & Welin’s 26 mistakenly assume that Neurodiversity leaders operate with an ideology of what is known as “Aspie Supremacy,” a derivative of Asperger’s name and the former diagnostic label. According to the late Mel Baggs, an esteemed autistic activist who coined the term in 1998, Aspie Supremacists “believe to have more valuable skills, more logic, less dysfunction … than other autistics” and non-autistics. 27 In other words, Aspie Supremacy is an extreme faction of the autistic community rather than a branch of the Neurodiversity Movement. Opposed to the principles and practices of neurodivergent activists and scholars, Aspie Supremacists largely campaign on toxic masculinity, promoting White supremacy and other forms of hatred. 28 Recent research has proven significant in demonstrating that these dichotomies, primarily diagnostic criteria intent on severing community ties, underlay the medicalization of everyday life, increasingly fueling for-profit pharma in the form of “treatments” and “therapeutic training” for autism and other forms of neurodivergence.29–32
Recommendations
Circling back to the roots of neurodivergent activism and scholarship along with its commitment to resisting and actualizing “tactical weaponry for intervening in shifting currents of power,” the Neurodiversity Movement operates on an “oppositional consciousness” to counter unfair expectations of high achievement and productivity and other normative values that harm neurodivergent people. An oppositional consciousness is an embodied understanding of and thrust against oppressive systems characteristic of global neoliberal capitalism, White supremacy, and settler colonialism. 33
In this light, we contend that educators’ and clinicians’ distancing of neurodiversity from disability and the use of neurodiversity as a marketing ploy alludes to a false progressive stance claiming to support neurodivergent peoples’ liberation. This stance circulates without any factual knowledge of its history, its connections to the disability experience, and thus disability activism, disability and critical autism studies, and neurodivergent leadership. Harms incurred by the misuses of Neurodiversity can be categorized into 1. willful ignorance characterized by clinicians’ and educators’ disconnect from fields such as disability and critical autism studies, which leads to disseminating fallacies and perpetuating harm by transmitting misconceptions to pre-service students. For example, special educators “claim a form of moral high ground. Nonetheless, they appear unconvincing due to an unwillingness to engage with the lived experiences of disabled people who have stated with reason, ‘Nothing about us without us’”; 34 2. professional benevolence, which assumes superiority over neurodivergent and other disabled people through a savior mentality—Van der Klift and Kunc highlight society’s perception of disabled people “as perpetual receivers of help” perpetuated by “descriptors like “less fortunate” and “needy,” telethons, and tear-jerker journalism”; 35 3. consumption and marketability, which perpetuates harmful narratives about neurodivergence that create the “need for, consent to, and legitimacy of interventionist logics” that contribute to the circuit of global capitalism where “there is money to be made” in behavior modification technologies, behavioral analysis certifications, and educational programming. 36
To close, we offer recommendations for countering the harms that result from the appropriation and misuse of Neurodiversity toward building liberatory pathways for genuine engagement with grassroots knowledge relating to institutional practices, pedagogy, and research.
Institutional Practice
Cultural consciousness
We urge professionals, educators, and other actors engaging with DEI efforts to disrupt dominant discourses about Neurodiversity without engaging neurodivergent knowledge or expertise. Conscientious practice requires questioning institutional intentions to guard against portraying neurodiversity and disability as fundamentally different, with neurodivergence being viewed as acceptable and disability as an abject other. A conscious and responsive understanding of disability as directly connected to neurodivergence is essential to avoiding common misconceptions that cause divisions and fragmentation among disability communities.
Critical view of benevolence
Historically, disability has been perceived as a tragedy, with disabled people portrayed as eternal recipients of charity and benevolence. This sentiment persists today and manifests through feel-good initiatives and paternalistic “acts of kindness,” causing further harm. While the tendency to side with those with good intentions is strong, raising critical consciousness about the histories of disability that inform these responses is necessary to resist further oppression and to shed light on disabled peoples’ creative acts of resilience and community-building toward collective liberation.
Pedagogy
Centering firsthand experience
Culturally sustaining pedagogy requires valuing the experience of students and communities most impacted by compounding oppression. We urge that educators build course content that centers firsthand experience of neurodivergent people while decentering traditional expert discourse. To contribute to the liberatory potential of culturally sustaining pedagogy, this content should recognize the reclaimed language, preferred identity descriptors, and symbols we choose to accurately represent a widely diverse community’s various cultural practices, orientations, and frameworks.
Bridging pedagogy and community practice
As disabled, neurodivergent educators, our ties to our grassroots communities are strong. Building on the previous recommendation, we encourage non-disabled educators to consider how grassroots practices can inform classroom instruction and the application of liberatory frameworks such as Disability Justice to elevate the agency and bodymind autonomy of neurodivergent people.
Research
Subverting the expert Echo-Chamber
When learning from neurodivergent people and their rich knowledge base, it is vital to relinquish the impulse to dictate what information is legitimate and which is illegitimate according to inflexible scientific filters. The importance of recognizing the limitations and harms of prioritizing the expertise of healthcare and service professionals, teachers, parents, and other stakeholders and mediators of the disability experience is twofold: 1) Researchers have an ethical responsibility of clear acknowledgment of limitations and documented harms of research about disability without the active participation of disabled people — that is, disabled people as meaning-makers, primary contributors to disability’s knowledge base, and as researchers themselves. 2) When co-opted, neurodiversity content is largely rooted in clinical and deficit-based discourses. This is the case for academic journals, books, and online content. Therefore, attention to confirmation bias is crucial not only to interrupt the reproduction of deficit-based research that permeates academia and education in general but also, more importantly, to bring neurodivergent people’s knowledge to the front and center of any scientific, pedagogical, and practical discourse about neurodiversity. As the community’s motto affirms—Nothing About Us Without Us!
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
This paper is inspired by the neurodivergent grassroots community’s relentless fight for liberation from medicalizing discourses and deficit narratives, which harm disabled people globally. We thank Kiki Grandi Soriano for their support in revising and editing this paper’s formatting style.
Authors’ Contributions
S.M.A. and S.S.: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Investigation, Writing—Original draft preparation.
Author Disclosure Statement
No competing financial interests exist.
Funding Information
No funding was received for this article.