This article explores the tensions within inclusive education and emphasises the research community’s responsibility to enhance the understanding and practical application of inclusive practices. It highlights the challenges the researchers face when navigating diverse scientific disciplines, often leading to entrenched policies that overlook varied epistemologies. We aim to display and open up for scrutiny current and ongoing social epistemologies in research on inclusive education that can be achieved through a diverse research environment in the field of inclusive education, and its attempt to recognise and accommodate diverse epistemologies within research on inclusive education. Utilising Bacchi’s comparative policy analysis, we analyse researchers’ interpretations of inclusion and its implications. The article concludes by advocating for a broader embrace of theoretical diversity and a more nuanced, lived understanding of inclusion, challenging prevailing monocultural interpretations.

This article investigates neuromixed love stories in novels that include a named autistic character, are written by autistic authors, or have characters who have been named by paratexts as autistic. In the article, we invoke a collective autoethnographic literary approach, using our reading diaries or letters to each other as source material. From an autistic perspective we explore neurotypical heterosexual neuromixed love stories and autistic counter love stories focusing on how neurotypical and autistic characters are represented. Our main findings are two dichotomies and two happy endings. In neurotypical heterosexual neuromixed love stories, the dichotomy of a female autistic grotesque and the male neurotypical savior is central where the happy ending is curing or masking autism, upholding both heteronormativity and neuronormativity. In autistic counter love stories, the happy ending is rather framed as unmasking and founding a way of life outside of neuro- and heteronormativity for both parties.

Highly effective early autistic activism gave considerable impetus to changes in the way autism research is conceived and carried out, notably through Critical Autism Studies (CAS). Little, though, has been similarly formalised challenging pathology-driven views of other forms of neurodivergence in research. However, there are increasing signs that this is changing, perhaps most particularly concerning ADHD. Here, we propose a tentative outline for what a Critical ADHD Studies - drawing on, bleeding into, and yet retaining its own specificities from both CAS and emergent Neurodiversity Studies - might resemble. This is neither a gate-keeping exercise nor a definitive mapping out of a field. Neither is 'critical', here, concerned with discussion of the validity of ADHD diagnoses. Rather, we seek points of intersection and of potential ally-ship, pulling together approaches centring ADHD lived experience, depathologisation, and ADHD affirmative world-making with related fields such as CAS and Neurodiversity Studies.

In this paper we seek to restory what has been storied as “the problem of ADHD”. Informed by calls for a critical ADHD studies, we explore the possibilities of ADHD collective autoethnographic storytelling. Together we (en)counter narratives of ADHD. Within our collective writing space, from our ADHD/AuDHD bodyminds, we seek to re-story our ADHD/AuDHD. We map a field of critical ADHD research within social sciences and point out problems of outsider perspectives, stressing a need for insider perspectives. Our data consist of collective authoethnographic writings about ADHD. From the data we have explored our experiences of (En)Countering ADHD narratives, and a transition process which we refer to as from ”broken NT-scholars” to neurodivergent scholars, stressing the importance of ADHD:ers as independent as well as collective agents, and ADHD as epistemological standpoint within research.

With this chapter, we lay out-necessarily partially-some key elements of the ADHD research field. After summarizing research concerned, albeit often in differing ways, with pathology and diagnosis, we move on to look in some detail at 'alternative' narratives of ADHD. Through a consideration of strength-based and cognitive difference approaches, we move towards a tentative notion of what a Critical ADHD Studies (CADS) might resemble, noting points of comparison and divergence with Critical Autism Studies (CAS) as we go. We suggest a summary of elements that CADS could work towards: the epistemic value of situated knowledge; the need for intersectionality and interdisciplinarity; a critical eye on behavioural norms and their role in conceptualizing and pathologizing ADHD; and a need to 'unknow' and to 'relearn' what we think we know about ADHD. Within CAS, considerable tensions have arisen from sometimes exclusive (re-)definitions of what CAS is or should be. Here, we explicitly avoid laying claim to a definitive definition of CADS. Rather, we seek out points of articulation between approaches holding potential for epistemically and ethically just ways that ADHDers might be centred as agents, and ADHD discourse 're-storied.' 

In this introductory chapter, the editors present the logic behind this, the first edited volume dedicated to questions of research methodology and ethics within Neurodiversity Studies. The chapter first gives some background to the field, setting it briefly in the context of neurodiversity approaches more broadly, and then presents the logic behind the book. Without seeking a definitive or exhaustive definition of this emergent field, the editors go on to lay out some of the key concepts and tensions within Neurodiversity Studies. The chapter concludes with a summary of the 26 chapters in this collection.

Autistic love may go unnoticed by neurotypical spectators due to the double empathy problem (Milton, 2012) and a neurotypical gaze (McDermott, 2022). Together, these reproduce limiting recognitions of love to a narrow set of behaviors, such as certain acts of love. To oppose the exclusion resulting from such conventions, we use a collective autoethnographic literary approach to explore (1) scientific and fictional depictions of autistic love, (2) neurodivergent readers' (including our own) experiences of those depictions, and (3) how our own experiences may neuroqueer traditional ideas of love. By this we illustrate a broader range of pleasure and connection. Thus, the chapter invites the reader into an intimate experience of rereading love to recenter autistic perspectives, connect within and across neurotypes, and celebrate diverse forms of autistic acts of love.

This edited collection of contributions explores non-normative genders, sexualities, and relationality among Autistic people. Written within an explicitly neuro-affirmative frame, the collection celebrates the diversity and richness of Autistic identity, sexuality, gender, and relationships, exploring areas such as consent, embodiment, ink, kink, sex education, and therapeutic work. All editors and contributors are neurodivergent and members of the communities that the book focuses on, providing an authentic and unique exploration of gender, sexuality, and relationality in Autistic people by Autistic/other neurodivergent authors. The book is primarily intended for postgraduate students and academics across disciplines including sociology, social work, psychology, disability studies, inclusive and special education, and sexual education. Mental health professionals and educators will also find it a useful resource to support their Autistic clients as well as developing their own understanding about how to support Autistic people in a neurodiversity-affirming, kink-affirming, LGBTQ+, and gender-variant way.

This chapter sets out the problem of looking at Autistic sexualities, genders, and relationalities from a distance within a deficit approach, one that stresses lack and need for “correction”. It proceeds to introduce neurodiversity-affirming approaches, drawing on neuroqueer and feminist theorizing to stress the importance of recognition of neurodivergence and different expressions of sexualities, genders, and relationalities among Autistic people. We also examine the importance of finding another way of telling our stories, including citing differently in order to move the field forward in a neurodiversity-affirming way. The book content is introduced, divided into four different sections: beginnings, evolving understandings, unlearning and relearning, and conclusions. The chapter ends with a note on editors.

In the concluding chapter, the central learnings from all chapters are summarized. We present reflections on each chapter as we draw together the overall gestalt of what we have learned, unlearned, or perhaps relearned as we have worked on the text. We explore the necessity of naming the nameless before it can be thought, the need to tell each other different stories, and how our understandings may evolve through unlearning what we thought we knew. When we share experiences with each other, new concepts and ways of naming ourselves and our experiences emerges. The chapter ends with implications of our learnings for practice and possible new ways of conducting research on Autistic sexualities, relationalities, and genders.