‘Neurodiversity as Politics’ is a paper that caught my eye and has been the subject of much thought and reflection in recent days with friends.
Setting aside its interesting identification of the neurotypical privilege vs the minority neurodiverse community, the paper focuses on the ever-growing (and, in fact, now very large) neurodiverse community. This community is is defining for itself what neurodiversity means. ‘Neurodiversity as Politics’ identifies key factional issues that are, being both, advanced by; and being inclusive of, the strong activist population.
Neurodiversity is very much a political issue, and was never a ‘medical issue’ alone. While this excellent paper highlights the different groups well – I am reminded of Dr Steve Shores words:
“If you’ve met one individual with autism, you’ve met one individual with autism.”
There is no one set of answers, and certainly no simple answers.
The full paper is below (scroll down), or you can download the PDF here.
Mark Quinn-Newall
