Introduction
The first book to bring together a large collection of neurodiverse contributors to talk about events that shaped the movement, and which they themselves were involved with. Focuses on activists’ direct experience effecting change for people who identify as autistic rather than abstract accounts that reflect on autism’s social construction or essence. Provides a one-stop shop for readers interested in the history and ideas of the neurodiversity movement and how these ideas have shaped production of expert and especially lay knowledge about autism. Gathers a collective of autistic activist/academic voices and engages in current theoretical debates around knowledge production and epistemic authority within (critical) research on autism.
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Abstract
This edited collection offers a historical overview of the autistic community and neurodiversity movement through first-hand accounts. While the awareness and impact of the movement have grown, apparent misunderstandings persist. Therefore, the editor introduces the neurodiversity movement, documenting concepts via the scientific literature, community activists and advocates, and the contributors themselves. This covers the terms neurodiversity and neurodiversity movement, the breadth of the movement, the rhetorical basis of its advocacy in neurological differences, its overlap with and divergence from the medical model, and its emphasis on self-advocacy. Then the introduction explains the approach to commissioning and editing contributing chapters, the historical background to the subject matter, and how the chapters fit into themes of gaining community, getting heard, and possibly entering the autism establishment.
Contents
Introduction
Gaining Community
- Historicizing Jim Sinclair’s “Don’t Mourn for Us”: A Cultural and Intellectual History of Neurodiversity’s First Manifesto, Sarah Pripas-Kapit
- From Exclusion to Acceptance: Independent Living on the Autistic Spectrum, Martijn Dekker
- Autistic People Against Neuroleptic Abuse, Dinah Murray
- Autistics.Org and Finding Our Voices as an Activist Movement, Laura A. Tisoncik
- Losing, Mel Baggs
Getting Heard
- Neurodiversity.Com: A Decade of Advocacy. Kathleen Seidel
- Autscape, Karen Leneh Buckle
- The Autistic Genocide Clock, Meg Evans
- Shifting the System: AASPIRE and the Loom of Science and Activism, Dora M. Raymaker
- Out of Searching Comes New Vibrance, Sharon daVanport
- Two Winding Parent Paths to Neurodiversity Advocacy, Carol Greenburg, Shannon Des Roches Rosa
- Lobbying Autism’s Diagnostic Revision in the DSM-5, Steven K. Kapp, Ari Ne’eman
- Torture in the Name of Treatment: The Mission to Stop the Shocks in the Age of Deinstitutionalization, Shain M. Neumeier, Lydia X. Z. Brown
- Autonomy, the Critical Journal of Interdisciplinary Autism Studies, Larry Arnold
- My Time with Autism Speaks, John Elder Robison
- Covering the Politics of Neurodiversity: And Myself, Eric M. Garcia
- “A Dream Deferred” No Longer: Backstory of the First Autism and Race Anthology, Morénike Giwa Onaiwu
Entering the Establishment?
Download Full Book
Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories from the Frontline
Explore Further
- Agents of our own destiny: activism and the road to the disability Royal Commission, 2021
- Meet Judy Singer a NeuroDiversity Pioneer: An Interview with the Australian Sociologist who coined the term ‘Neurodiversity’, Spectrum Suite
- NeuroDiversity: The Birth of an Idea, 2017, Judy Singer
- Tip Sheets for Autistic LGBTIQA Young People, I Can Network
- Lessons from the Campaign to Stop Independent Assessments Webinar
- Disability Justice Links
