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Mutual Aid and Human-Centered Learning for Neurodivergent and Disabled People

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Stimpunks Glossary Develop A Language In Which We Can Both Understand And Challenge The World Photo of wooden letter blocks spelling the word GLOSSARY

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Develop a Language in Which We Can Both Understand and Challenge the World

The shift from the pathology paradigm to the neurodiversity paradigm calls for a radical shift in language, because the appropriate language for discussing medical problems is quite different from the appropriate language for discussing diversity.

THROW AWAY THE MASTER’S TOOLS: LIBERATING OURSELVES FROM THE PATHOLOGY PARADIGM

In politics our frames shape our social policies and the institutions we form to carry out policies. To change our frames is to change all of this. Reframing is social change.

When we successfully reframe public discourse, we change the way the public sees the world. We change what counts as common sense. Because language activates frames, new language is required for new frames. Thinking differently requires speaking differently.

The ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

Terror comes in many forms and one powerful expression is when people become too fearful to develop a language in which they can both understand and challenge the world in which they live. Not only does such linguistic deprivation fail to ward off the plague of propaganda, but it also contributes ‘to an annihilation of the self and the destruction of the capacity to recognize the real world’.

Giroux, Henry A.. Pedagogy of Resistance (p. 31). Bloomsbury Publishing.

You Cannot Change a Reality That You Cannot Name

Kimberlé Crenshaw | ‘You Cannot Change a Reality That You Cannot Name’:  — FAIR

Language is also a place of struggle.

—bell hooks, Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness

“Language is also a place of struggle.” “Thinking differently requires speaking differently.” “Develop a language in which they can both understand and challenge the world in which they live.”

We may not know it, and be able to talk about it, because there’s been an agenda to erase our capacity to name that reality. And the clear fact is that you cannot change or transform a reality that you cannot name, you cannot historicize, you cannot conceptualize.

Kimberlé Crenshaw | ‘You Cannot Change a Reality That You Cannot Name’:  — FAIR

People often take issue against the terms used by marginalized people. We experience this in our advocacy regarding Identity First Language and the terms neurodivergent and neurotypical. These terms were coined to examine power and privilege, which is exactly what some don’t like about them.

Our glossary grows rapidly. We’re defining the small truths and the big truths of our daily existence.

Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share.

Post-truth is pre-fascism.

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (p. 71). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

“Language is also a place of struggle.”

“Thinking differently requires speaking differently.“

“Develop a language in which they can both understand and challenge the world in which they live.”

Language is the most powerful tool we have.

Let’s use it well.

Divisive, demeaning and devoid of feeling: how social work jargon causes problems for families

Latest Glossary Terms

  • Relational Pattern Languages

    Relational pattern languages are simple, repeatable ways of describing how people connect, collaborate, and belong in shared environments.

  • Elopement

    elopement: When an Autistic person leaves the area because they have a physical need to escape. A form of crisis point similar to a meltdown or shutdown.

  • Disability Police

    Disability Police

    Anyone who uses accessible parking but who doesn’t look sufficiently disabled or who only uses their wheelchair sometimes has encountered the “Good Samaritan” stranger who demands that they prove their disability.

  • Neurotypical Perspectivelessness

    neurotypical perspectivelessness—the institutional erasure of neurotypicality as a cultural standpoint that allows its sensory, cognitive, and communicative norms to appear neutral and universally shared. Speaking from the in-between: Neurotypical perspectivelessness, neurodivergent authority, and the politics of knowledge – ScienceDirect neurotypical perspectivelessness: a world organized around someone else’s sensory, cognitive, and emotional reality, while insisting that…

  • Care Web

    Informal networks of disabled people and nondisabled people who provide care for one another. In contrast to charity models, which are characterized by power imbalances, care webs involve reciprocal relationships in which interdependence is highly valued.

  • Systems Generated Trauma

    Systems Generated Trauma

    It is a painful truth that many disabled children and their families are being traumatised—not by illness, not by accident, but by the very public services that are meant to help them. This is not a fringe issue. It is not rare. It is not acceptable. It is happening every day, in every corner of…

  • Epistemic Authority

    This is not about identity policing. It is about epistemic authority. Neurodiversity is not a neutral topic area or a branding category. It is a social justice movement and an epistemic intervention that emerged from autistic community spaces as a response to dehumanizing, medicalized, and eugenic logics of normality. To claim authority over “neurodiversity research”…

  • Neurosupremacy

    Neurosupremacy is the belief that certain neurodivergent people are superior to others, including other neurodivergent people. It operates internally, within neurodivergent communities and it echoes similar dynamics to ‘aspie supremacy but extends to supremacy over other forms of neurodivergence. Neurosupremacy ranks certain forms of neurodivergence as more legitimate, acceptable or valuable than others.

  • Moral Injury

    Moral injury is the profound distress experienced when individuals perpetrate, witness, or are complicit in actions that violate their deeply held moral values.

  • Moral Panic

    Moral panic: situation in which the public is tricked into overreacting to something that isn’t actually dangerous. Critical Race Theory And “Moral Panic” – YouTube Like the witch trials, the point of a moral panic is not to warn the public about a real threat. It’s to manipulate them. To take advantage of their fear…

  • Autism Grievance Parent

    “autism grievance parents”: These are parents who brand themselves as autism experts, yet promote reactionary ideas about autism and resentment towards autistic advocates—while encouraging followers to become too upset about having autistic children to question autism misinformation. Knowing how to identify and avoid grievance parents matters, because their efforts limit autistic people’s already challenging lives,…

  • Epistemic Pluralism

    Epistemic pluralism is the view that no single knowledge system holds a monopoly on truth. It values diverse ways of knowing and meaning-making (e.g., scientific, experiential, cultural) as equally important for understanding and solving complex issues.

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Essential Neurodiversity Vocabulary: The Good, The Bad, The Different

Here’s some essential neurodiversity, disability, and equity vocabulary grouped by the good, the bad, and the different.

Essential Neurodiversity Vocabulary: The Good, The Bad, The Different

Other Glossaries