ADHD women and non-binary AFAB ADHDers living in the United Kingdom, who are eligible, are invited to participate in the survey for the project ‘ADHD Women: Resisting a Neuronormative World’ (phase 3, 2024).
Optional participation: one recorded conversation (phase 4).
UPDATE
Recently I started with an international, interdisciplinary and generally fabulous team the research project ‘Co-Constructing ADHD Pedagogy’. With a small section of the ADHD reading group (i.e. the research team) we are reflecting together on our participation in and facilitation of the reading group. We are all ADHDers.
Continue reading →Here a brief announcement about the current 2024 ADHD Reading Group and the Eco-Ability (1st Fri/mo) and the Cripping Pedagogy (3rd Fri/mo) Reading Groups that will take place in 2025.
Continue reading →This is a brief announcement that a significant number of abstracts have been accepted for the special issue ‘Critical and Intersectional ADHD Thought: ADHDers Think Back’, to be published in the open access (and thus freely accessible) online journal Canadian Journal of Disability Studies (CJDS). The special issue is organised by Dr Eric Olund and yours truly (Dr Dyi Huijg). A first round of abstracts was accepted in 2022, then we invited additional abstracts in 2024 (recently). Unfortunately, due to circumstances we had to depart from the workshops that we planned initially. But still: only ADHDers contribute. The abstracts are very interdisciplinary – including a few artistic/creative contributions. And they both (1) push back against the medical/individual model of ADHD and (2) push forward the critical and intersectional thinking about ADHDness. We are very excited and really look forward to writing our own articles and reading all the papers of the other contributors. As the field of Critical and Intersectional ADHD Thought is emerging, we expect that there will be a significant time in between the submission of articles to the CJDS and the reviewing and rerturn of articles as, this being an emerging field, there are no ‘experts’ as of yet. As such, it will take possibly more time than publishing already takes before the individual articles and the special issue will be up. While not in workshop-format, from the abstracts we have been able to propose a number of symposia (pre-organised panels around a specific theme) for the Leeds Disability Studies Conference 2024, for those who are up for it. So that is something to look forward to in the interim :). I will keep you updated about the progress!
Find here the 2024 Call for (additional) Papers for the special issue ‘Critical and Intersectional ADHD Thought: ADHDers Think Back’, so that you have an idea what to expect from the special issue.
*** Please distribute widely ***
*** Deadline extended to 28 Oct 2022 ***
The organisers invite ADHD academics, PhD students and activists to submit an abstract for the workshop Critical and Intersectional ADHD Thought: ADHDers Think Back. We seek to publish a selection of the papers that result from the workshop as a special issue, with the same title, in an international disability journal. Please find considerations for submission below.
Despite recent exponential growth, the field of ADHD Studies is predominantly produced by non-ADHDers and continues to be dominated by the ‘medical/individual model of ADHD’ (Huijg, under review). This can refer to a biomedical lens (symptomatological, medicinal, genetic, neuroscientific etc.), clinical or therapeutic approaches for ‘treating’ ADHD, and/or to blatant anti-ADHD ableism. It can refer to any way that ADHD or ADHDers are posited as a problem or burden to themselves, or to anyone or anything else. What is central in this model is that the cause of ADHDers’ difficulties and/or the responsibility and solutions for these difficulties are located in, for instance, the ‘ADHD brain’, ‘ADHD treatment’, or the ADHDer’s behaviour or mental health (management). Even when ‘social dimensions of ADHD’ are discussed, they are too often made sense of “as a direct consequence of individual impairments” (cf. Oliver, 1990, p.6).
Publications with a more benevolent intention – employing an ‘It Is NOT Your Fault’ approach, focussing on empowerment, and/or on ‘good qualities/benefits’ of ADHDers in the workplace – might seek to move away from the problem/burden rhetoric, but rarely escape the individual responsibility/solutions angle. This is reinforced by the non-engagement with the disability movement’s adage ‘Nothing About Us Without Us’: ADHD knowledge is produced about ADHD and ADHDers, but without ADHDers’ own voices. It is fair to claim, then, that ADHD knowledge production is overwhelmingly dominated by the medical/individual model of ADHD and its gatekeepers.
Despite a 1:1 gender ratio of adult ADHD, ADHD is still associated with naughty white boys climbing up the walls and annoying their parents/teachers (Huijg, under review; see also e.g. Alharbi, 2017, p.2188). There is increasing literature about ADHD women, although specifically feminist analyses are missing. There is almost no research on race and ADHD – this includes a lack of the most foundational knowledge about, for instance, racial biases and disparities in accessing ADHD healthcare (e.g. in the UK this lacuna was only recognised last year by prominent ADHD professionals and scholars, see Young et al., 2021, p.4). Too much of the scientific ADHD literature lacks representation or mostly focuses on boys men (e.g. Biederman et al., 2012), on white people (Barkley, 2008; Michielsen et al., 2015), or relies on the exclusion of, for instance, indigenous populations such as “Canadians living on an aboriginal setting” (Pond, Fowler & Hesson, 2019, p.946). There is practically no knowledge on ADHD and other social categories – e.g. sexuality, faith, gender identity or class. And research that does engage with multiple social categories can still reproduce problematic if not neuroableist ideas.
At this point, it is fair to conclude that ADHD Studies is an acritical and non-intersectional field, produced by non-ADHDers.[1] What we need is critical and intersectional ADHD knowledge produced by ADHDers themselves.
We invite academics, PhD students and activists who identify as ADHDer to submit an abstract for a complete draft paper for the workshop Critical and Intersectional ADHD Thought: ADHDers Think Back. From the submitted papers to the workshop, a selection of the papers will be invited to rework their paper to submit it to a special issue, with the same title, which we seek to publish in an (open access/free) international disability journal.
We want to emphasise that at this moment in time there are no specialists as Critical and Intersectional ADHD Thought is an emerging area of study. We encourage those yet unfamiliar with the terrain to expand their existing research knowledge to ADHDness.[2] We welcome email enquiries and informal conversations to explore such ‘expansion’.
For a timeline, see the top of this Call.
After the workshop:
For this workshop, we only invite ADHDers to ‘think back’ and submit an abstract for a paper:
Alharbi, Rabab S. (2017). “ADHD in 140 characters or less: An analysis of Twitter commentary on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Saudi Arabia”. Universal Journal of Educational Research, 5(12), 2186-2195.
Barkley, Russell A. (2008). ADHD in adults: What the science says. New York: The Guildford Press.
Biederman, Joseph, Petty, Carter R, Woodworth, K Yvonne, et al. (2012). “Adult outcome of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a controlled 16-year follow-up study”. The Journal of clinical psychiatry, 73(7), 577.
Huijg, Dyi D. (under review). “ADHD women and gendered neuronormativity: A feminist and critical ADHD analysis of self-help books about and for ADHD women”
Michielsen, M., de Kruif, J. Th. C. M., Comijs, H. C., et al. (2015). “The Burden of ADHD in Older Adults: A Qualitative Study”. Journal of Attention Disorders, 22(6), 591-600.
Oliver, Mike. (1990). “The individual and social models of disability”. Paper presented at the Joint Workshop of the Living Options Group and the Research Unit of the Royal College of Physicians.
Pond, Emily, Fowler, Ken, & Hesson, Jacqueline. (2019). “The Influence of Socioeconomic Status on Psychological Distress in Canadian Adults With ADD/ADHD”. Journal of Attention Disorders, 23(9), 940-948.
Young, Susan, Asherson, Philip, Lloyd, Tony, et al. (2021). “Failure of healthcare provision for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in the United Kingdom: A consensus statement”. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12(324), 1-16.
[1] The lead organiser (Dyi Huijg) has drawn this conclusion in her capacity as the organiser of the Intersectional Neurodiversity Reading Group (start July 2019), and on the basis of her own postdoc research on ADHD women and intersectional anti-ADHD injustice.
[2] Contributors are invited to attend the Reading Group, which centres critical and intersectional conversations on ADHD between May-Dec 2022.
[3] You will not prepare comments/questions for the papers of the other panels.
[4] Critical as in ‘race critical theory’ or ‘critical autism studies’, not as in ‘gender critical’.
SUMMARY: This is the blog post for the flipped webinar Intersectional Approaches to Disability and Race, which was held on 9 July 2021. This blog post explores how the field of ADHD research is grounded in majority white research populations or ignores race altogether; arguably, it produces white knowledge about (adult) ADHD. UK Government data suggests raced and gendered ADHD disparities, but argues that these do not exist. Critical race and feminist questions emerge about ADHD and ADHD lives, experiences and perspectives, but remain unanswered. Medical research is not sufficient. We need a field of Critical ADHD Studies, which is ADHD-affirmative, intersectional, and produced by ADHDers themselves.
Continue reading →