Neurodiversity lite is still evolving

When we talk about “neurodiversity lite” in academia or research, we're usually talking about psychologists or psychiatrists who appropriate neurodiversity paradigm terminology while failing to adhere to the liberatory commitments and ethos of the neurodiversity movement. Prototypical neurodiversity lite leaders tend to be already established researchers at prestigious universities working on, say autism or ADHD from a medicalised perspective, who then make superficial neurodiversity paradigm changes to their framings while retaining the deeper commitments of their original approach. This form of elite capture effectively depoliticises neurodiversity frameworks, utilising the vocabularies of the movement to reproduce the exact ideologies and heirachies we've been trying to combat.

We can call this psychologist-led version the first wave of neurodivergersity lite, since it was the first chronologically and is also the most basic and readily identifiable form. By contrast, more recently I've become interested in what neurodiversity lite might mean in the arts and humanities. Especially as neurodiversity is (finally) now something of a hot topic for humanities researchers, there is more funding, more prestige, more willingness from academic presses to publish monographs, and so on. This emerging component of the neurodiversity industry means there's more incentive for ambitious humanities scholars to work on or use neurodiversity framings, regardless of whether they are neurodivergent activists or allies in any deeper sense.

Based on what I've seen, my worry is that just as in psychology, much, perhaps even most, current neurodiversity work in the humanities follows the logics of neurodiversity lite in terms of being increasingly divorced from the activism or liberatory politics of the movement, despite using a neurodiversity paradigm framing. Yet where this occurs, this increasingly tends to be a more insidious form of neurodiversity lite, cloaked in radical rhetoric and sometimes even explicitly framed as being opposed to neurodiversity lite. After all, any humanities scholars working on neurodiversity will quickly become familiar with the concept of neurodiversity lite, and of course will want to distance themselves from it, not to mention the psycholgists and psychiatrists it is primarily associated with. In any case, nobody, so far as I know, considers themselves to be neurodiversity-lite; it is always a term of critique.

I don't want to single our or name any individual here since I don't think that will be helpful. But to see the general form, imagine an elite university professor writing on, say, representations of neurodivergent characters in films or on the social metaphysics of ADHD, and who uses radical rhetoric - yet who in practice does nothing to stand in solidarity with neurodivergent or other oppressed people whenever it actually counts, and is overwhelmingly focused on advancing their own career, securing prestigious grants, and so on. In such cases - and there are many - it's not clear to me how this is any different from what the neurodiversity lite psychologists have been doing. It just might not be instantly recognisable as such because it doesn't look like the prototypical version from the first wave.

During the 2010s, and watching the rise of the first wave of neurodivergersity lite in horror, my own approach was initially to try to develop what I termed critical neurodiversity theory. This was developed (piecemeal, and with mixed results) on my old blog Critical Neurodiversity, active from 2015 to 2023. I saw this as grounded in the various traditions of critical theory and, crucially, developed with praxis in mind, in a manner that sought to provide one alternative to neurodiversity lite, which I often critiqued.

Given this background, I was delighted when I saw over the last few years that more academics, primarily in the arts and humanities, had started identifying their work as "critical neurodiversity" theory or studies, in new and interesting ways. These were often very different from my own approaches but were still often framed as alternatives to neurodiversity lite. Some of this work is, I think, extremely important: it gives me hope that our project is going somewhere, and that the liberatory ethos of the movement might be maintained to some extent within bougoise academia.

Yet to my dismay, over this same period I've also increasingly seen people who frame their work as "critical" neurodiversity studies nonetheless ultimately act with a complete absence of meaningful commitment to any kind of liberatory politics or solidarity, even working to directly undermine collective struggle whenever these come into tension with their own career prospects. (I don't mean to go into details here; perhaps I'll write about the specifics at a later date). In this, I worry that, partly driven by the development of new neurodiversity research industries and the increasing prestige of neurodiversity paradigm expertise, we see a second wave of neurodiversity lite, one that has evolved to become more complex, more subtle, than the first wave.

To keep the emancipatory potential of the movement alive in academia, we need to recognize that while having things like critical neurodiversity studies can help provide spaces where alternatives to neurodiversity lite can be developed, they equally provide grounds for new forms of neurodivergersity lite to grow and take hold. We must, then, resist any static conception of neurodiversity lite, and recognize that it will continue to develop in tandem with the very real advances of neurodiversity theory and organising. Understanding this may be the first step to maintaining space for a more radical ethos in neurodiversity research, which, especially in an age of mass reaction, is still a project worth fighting for.