Judy Singer is usually acknowledged for having coined the term 'neurodiversity', in this sociology thesis about autism and society. Reading her essay is one way to start educating yourself on the needs of the autistic community and its right for international advocacy! This, of course, requires widespread education of the whole community! 'People on the Autistic Spectrum are beginning to demonstrate that 'Neurotypical' is not the only way to be', proven by the unsuccessful approaches of general psychoanalysis that too often aims to cure and fix them rather than accept them for being differently wired and fighting for more appropriate inclusion. She aims to ´depict, demystify and promote the growing social movement of autistics' in the hope that 'we get used to the idea that our minds are a lot more strange and wonderful than we have lately given them credit for being.' This volume reproduces the original thesis with the addition of a new introduction, which gives the background to the creation of the work and offers some thoughts on the current neurodiversity movement.Īs a daughter of a mother with Asperger's syndrome, and the mother of a daughter with Asperger's syndrome, Judy Singer - also 'somewhere on the spectrum' - has written a persuasive and important essay about 'neurodiversity', a term she is credited to have coined and describes the emergence of a new category of disability. At the same time it offered a critique of what Singer perceived to be a certain tendency towards social-constructionist fundamentalism within the disability movement, which, she argued, limited the potential of the new paradigm.

Its chapters encompassed a brief history of autism, self-exploration of Singer’s life in the middle of three generations of women “somewhere on the autistic spectrum” and her research as a participant-observer on InLv, an online community of people on the spectrum.

The work attempted a panoramic view of this new terrain from within a post-modern, social constructionist, feminist, disability rights perspective. And in the process, prefigured a new paradigm within the disability rights movement of the time. The word itself was just one of many ideas in this work, her 1998 Honours thesis, a pioneering sociological work that mapped out the emergence of a new category of disability that, till then, had no name. Judy Singer is generally credited with the coinage of the word that became the banner for the last great social movement to emerge from the 20th century.

Judy singer neurodiversity