Here a brief announcement about the current 2024 ADHD Reading Group and the scheduled 2025 Eco-Ability and the Cripping Pedagogy Reading Groups.

The reading group(s) – the Intersectional Neurodiversity and Disability Reading Groups – have run in various forms since July 2019 (3^rd Friday of the month) and Jan 2020 (1^st Friday of the month). In 2022 first and then resumed in 2024, one of the ‘spin-off’ readings groups has been, or rather is, the ADHD Reading Group (ADHD-RG), running on both Fridays. However the ADHD-RG which will not continue in 2025. Frankly, it has already proven to be almost impossible to find readings that we don’t want to (or must!) tear apart and, instead, that forward our critical and intersectional thinking about ADHDness, so I cannot imagine having to find even more articles for us to read (or, rather, tear apart)! I might organise an ADHD-RG v2 when all the articles have been published for the special issue Critical and Intersectional ADHD Thought: ADHDers Think Back, that I am co-organising.

Rather than returning to separate reading groups in 2025 – one on neurodiversity and one on disability (as in the period 2019-2022) – I have decided to continue with ‘thematic reading groups’. I was moving back and forth between themes, but found it important to have one theme that is perhaps more about process and form (here: pedagogy) where the other one is more about a topic (here: eco-ability). In 2025 (always 3-4.30pm UK), I have opted for two reading groups:

• The Eco-Ability Reading Group (or: the Eco-Ability Reading Group: Disability, Environmental & Animal Justice). Per the tin, we will read and discuss texts on the nexus of disability justice and/or environmental justice and animal justice. The Eco-Ability RG will take place on the 1^st Friday of the month. You can find the (currently provisional) reading list & schedule on this page here. I’ve to admit that I use ‘eco-ability’, and I might well find that after properly engaging with the topic that the reading group doesn’t sufficiently do justice to ‘eco-ability’ as a movement, as an area of thought and critique etc. That’s a bit of the risk of a reading group: I do my best to select texts, and where possible consult others who are more knowledgeable, but I do not read all the texts beforehand. In other words: a reading group is not like teaching. It has a (crip) pedagogy of its own. Which is a nice seque to…..

• The Cripping Pedagogy Reading Group (or: the Cripping Pedagogy Reading Group: Cripping, Sickening, Neurodiversifying & Maddening Pedagogy). Per the tin, we will read and discuss texts that crip, sicken, neurodiversify and/or madden pedagogy – all to a greater or lesser extent building on a ‘critical pedagogy’ (in itself buidling on ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’) orientation. I have a list of 50 potential readings, so will ‘just’ need to make a selection now. But I put up a placeholder page (with a schedule of dates already), which you can find here, so just keep an eye out for the actual list.

Read here more on the Co-Constructing ADHD Pedagogy research project that a few of us in the reading group are conducting (on ourselves and on each other). To emphasise, the Cripping Pedagogy RG will be helpful for us to make sense of ADHD Pedagogy, but is not specifically (only, or particularly) about ADHD Pedagogy!

If you want to join one or more reading groups / meetings, or just want to be kept in the loop and/or have access to the readings (all legit reasons), just copy-paste the questions with your answers in an email to the reading groups’ email address per the instructions on this page here. Registration means zero obligation to attend. FWIW: I keep zilch admin of who attends. Attend if/as/when. And no need to even let me know if you are or are not attending (but you’re welcome to if you want to.) Mind, the participation/facilitation/accessibility guidelines etc. are not everyone’s cup of tea, but that’s fine too: they might (sometimes) work for you, or they might not (at all or always).