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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

  • 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.

  • Sensory Fluid

    Sensory Fluid

    Sensory Fluid embraces dressing for your spoons and social battery as they vary. Sensory Fluid is a neuroqueer, non-gendered approach to clothing, adornment, and self-presentation that follows the actual state of your nervous system rather than fixed rules about fashion, coordination, or propriety. It rejects the idea that you should present yourself the same way…

  • Intensive Interaction

    Intensive Interaction

    Intensive Interaction is a way of connecting and communicating with people who don’t use speech as their main way of relating to the world — including many Autistic people, non-speaking people, and people with significant learning disabilities. The core idea is simple: instead of trying to get the person to come into your world, you…

  • Emergent Allostasis

    Emergent allostasis: Health understood as the ongoing capacity of a system to maintain regulatory coherence through predictive adjustment, not the absence of symptoms but the sustained ability to adapt Toward an Emergent Paradigm for Neurodiversity and Health – Lori Hogenkamp, Dhwani Sanghavi, Heini Natri, 2026 emergent allostasis—a dynamic state of sustainable regulation that ESF (Evolutionary…

  • Stress Incoherence

    Stress incoherence : A system state in which internal calibrations no longer align with external conditions, generating chronic prediction error, metabolic depletion, or cascading dysregulation; disorder understood as a system state rather than an intrinsic defect Toward an Emergent Paradigm for Neurodiversity and Health – Lori Hogenkamp, Dhwani Sanghavi, Heini Natri, 2026 This paper introduces…

  • Relational Pattern Languages

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

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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