So, don’t worry if you’re not completely familiar with the ins and outs of Neurodiversity. It only really emerged in the 90s, and we’re just now seeing the widespread use of the term throughout our society.

Autistics.Org and Finding Our Voices as an Activist Movement, Laura A.Neurodiversity is a relatively new term.

Autistic People Against Neuroleptic Abuse, Dinah Murray.

From Exclusion to Acceptance: Independent Living on the Autistic Spectrum, Martijn Dekker.

Historicizing Jim Sinclair’s “Don’t Mourn for Us”: A Cultural and Intellectual History of Neurodiversity’s First Manifesto, Sarah Pripas-Kapit.

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. 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. Therefore, the editor introduces the neurodiversity movement, documenting concepts via the scientific literature, community activists and advocates, and the contributors themselves. While the awareness and impact of the movement have grown, apparent misunderstandings persist. This edited collection offers a historical overview of the autistic community and neurodiversity movement through first-hand accounts.

This book is an open-access publication and licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. 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. 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. 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.

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.

Judy singer autism