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

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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

  • Shared-Signal Space

    Shared-Signal Space: The mode of connection carried by signal rather than proximity — a voice note, a thread, a call left open in the background, a message typed and read across distance. For many Autistic, ADHD, and otherwise neurodivergent people, this is where regulation, access, and honest connection come easiest, away from masking and sensory…

  • Threshold Anxiety

    Also called transition anxiety. Threshold anxiety is the anxiety of crossing a threshold — the dread that lands at the edge of a change, before you have even begun it. It shows up at the small, literal edges and the big life-sized ones alike: The feeling arrives before the crossing. The doorway, the first day,…

  • Shared-Air Space

    Shared-Air Space

    SAS (Shared-Air Space): An alternative to “IRL” (in real life) that names physical, co-located presence without implying that other spaces — online, digital, networked — are somehow less real. “IRL” quietly encodes a hierarchy: physical presence as real, everything else as lesser. For many Autistic, ADHD, and other neurodivergent people, this hierarchy doesn’t hold. Online…

  • Neurodiversity Infinity Symbol

    Neurodiversity Infinity Symbol

    The neurodiversity infinity symbol in its original orientation represents belonging and infinite possibility. Turned, it becomes a pedagogy.

  • ARLES

    ARLES

    ARLES is the Stimpunks Design Method. It names the five layers through which neurodivergent life is structured, and the order in which environments must be redesigned to support it: Attention → Relational (including Regulation) → Lived Experience → Environment → Systems. Each layer holds up the one above it. Begin with attention and nervous-system safety.…

  • Epistemic Enablement

    Epistemic enablement describes the conditions that allow people to contribute knowledge from their own perspective, in their own form.

  • Attachment Theory

    Attachment theory attempts to describe the way humans form emotional bonds with each other, particularly within long-standing relationships. Developed primarily by psychiatrist John Bowlby beginning in the 1930s and extended by his student Mary Ainsworth, it frames bonding as a developmental process shaped above all by early caregiver relationships — arguing that how a caregiver…

  • Affective Injustice

    Affective injustice refers to an injustice related to a person as an affective being. It is thus a quite general category of injustice: it involves any kind of injustice in which emotions and affects play a central role.

  • Safe Food

    A safe food is a food that a person can reliably eat — especially during hard moments. It has the right texture, taste, smell, and predictability. It doesn’t ask anything unexpected of you. Safe foods are not about preference or being picky. They are about access. For many autistic and disabled people, safe foods are…

  • Echophenomena

    Echophenomena: Imitative or repetitive actions without explicit awareness. To be autistic is to negotiate intentional movements, movements that straddle the rhetorical and the non-rhetorical, that middle and murk. Yergeau 2018 (179), Yergeau, M. Remi. 2018. Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Duke University Press. echophenomena—that is, the echoing of words, sounds, motions, and other…

  • Engineered Exclusion

    engineered exclusion: the predictable sidelining of disabled users resulting from choices about data provenance, model objectives, and evaluation practices within AI systems.

  • Designed Dignity

    Designed dignity refers to the intentional embedding of respect, agency, and expressive equity into the architecture of technology itself.

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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