I refer to the scurrilous and erroneous trashtake of my work by the two most prominent northern academic Johnny-Come-Latelies to the neurodiversity discourse, not forgetting their 4 dedicated acolytes. How did this envious crew manage to slip past the (self-proclaimed)"expert" fact-checkers of the highly esteemed Sage Journals: Autism?
This new generation of northern scholars and academics identify themselves as a group of “6 International Scholars of Neurodiversity”. In the interests of complete transparency and accountability, I like to think of them by their correct title:
"6 Northern Anglo-Colonialist Pretenders to the Neurodiversity Crown".
For scholars, they appear to be singularly devoid of the most basic research skills and ethics, given the error-laden libel they've dished up, as I will show below.
For brevity I will refer to them as "The Sage 6", even though you will find they show anything but sagacity.
Aside: Their beatup is rumoured to be motivated by a "Revenge of the Trans" vendetta, but who am I to say?
I would hope the 6 academics have not been relying on Wikipedia's nameless and self-appointed northern "editors" given their dubious qualifications รถ assuming these individuals even have any.
If the authors had shown even a modicum of common sense, they might have made some pertinent enquiries. They might have found out that I corresponded with Harvey Blume for many years from 1997 onwards. Indeed I believe I shared this information years ago with Chapman. I need tech support to get back into my archives, but I can't afford it, as I already explained.
Where I said ''that I'm sure I coined Neurodiversity'' I also stated that the concept was probably ''in the air'' aka "the zeitgeist". I said the same thing in my thesis.
The crew comprises:
- the Young Pretender to the neurodiversity crown, Dr Robert J Chapman.
Hey Robert, be my guest! Take it if you want it that badly, for you will find that "heavy is the head that wears the crown". - the Not So Young (despite his very fetching avatar ... depicted below) Nick Walker, a "professor" at some kind of Californian alternative-type tertiary institution. Scare quotes intentional. Sorry, not sorry, but being a relic of the glorious 60s myself, I'm a bit disillusioned by anything smacking of "New Age"ism. I prefer my "professors"accredited by reliable national institutions.
- ... and their 4 acolytes
How this crew managed to get their dodgy so-called "research" past the eagle eyes of the esteemed journal Sage Publications Autism and their expert "fact-checkers" is anyone's guess.
According to Sage's publishers, their purported fact checkers are "people with expertise in the matter". I'm still waiting to find out who these so called "experts" are. Whoever they are, Sage's highly experienced editors might surely have had enough brains to realise that The Sage 6 might not have access to my original documents and correspondence that disprove their calumnies and wilful confabulations. And to add insult to injury, Sage have sooled their dedicated in-house legal team onto me, who have sent me some (very deniably) threatening letters, although who am I to decide what feels threatening to me in the face of Sage's learned legal counsel?
I, of course, cannot afford a legal team to go up against a publishing juggernaut like Sage Journals, especially since the Sage 6 have frightened off any potential employers. Not that I ever made much money anyway, despite the fact that my idea has launched a thousand enterprises. Nothing much since March 2024, when Sage first disseminated these calumnies, except some measly royalties from my book, "Neurodiversity: the Birth of an Idea". (You might like to read it as it contains my original thesis, with a preface about its provenance)
My correction
I begin on a far from trivial correction:
The Sage 6 are hardly “International” scholars. American plus British does not add up to “Internationality”. It adds up to North-Centrism aka "Northern Hemisphere Cultural Hegemony".
Quite an over-reach, especially from people who appear to have been unable to shake off the ingrained habits of British Colonialism and USA Cultural Imperialism. But let's move on to the main issues
The 6 contenders rely
heavily on two shaky platforms:
- The, dare I say, resentful “evidence” of a non-scholar Martijn Dekker whose ignorance of academic process in the social sciences will be glaringly obvious to any academic. For Dekker's information, every academic thesis undergoes a comprehensive ethics review before acceptance. From this, it can be deduced that my thesis was checked and accepted. I have rebutted Dekker’s absurd confirmation-biased confabulations here.
- A lot of freewheeling assumptions about the role of American freelance journalist Harvey Blume in the development of the term Neurodiversity, all of which can be traced back to the work of Wikipedia’s amateur “editors”.
* To make it completely clear, our relationship was purely intellectual and not romantic
To underscore: I am not an academic. I chose not to be. Like anything in life, academia has its strengths and weaknesses. I found it both inspiring and suffocating. The senior academics at my university certainly did not get that I was creating a new paradigm in disability studies which at that time only understood "physical, intellectual, and 'mental illness'" to which autistics were consigned. This is understandable. I didn't get it myself at the time either. But career cademics are very discomfited by paradigm shifts, for obvious reasons. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wikipedia is not an academic resource
While we can blame Wikipedia and its amateurs, so much more culpable are any lazy academics who venture to use Wikipedia as a research authority, or even a research gateway.
Wikipedia’s scandal-addicted amateurs have been playing around with my entries for going on 3 decades now. I long ago gave up trying to set the record straight with them.
I notice the Sage 6's derogatory allegations have been inserted into the item on Neurodiversity, and most disgustingly into my actual biography. I have registered a complaint with wikipedia, but it seems the good ship Wikipedia is deserted...
Sexism too?
I cannot help wondering if it is completely beyond Wikipedia's amateur so-called "editors" to imagine that someone who is neither American nor Male can nevertheless be capable of coming up with a "Big Idea" all by ourselves!
Reflexivity
BTW, academics working in the social sciences are required to practice reflexivity and question their own motives. I commend this practice to the Sage 6.
As a non-academic blogger, Dekker is of course free to throw self-reflection to the winds and write whatever fantasies he dreams up. But academics are liable if they take amateurs on trust because.
As a non-academic blogger, Dekker is of course free to throw self-reflection to the winds and write whatever fantasies he dreams up. But academics are liable if they take amateurs on trust because.
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| Click to enlarge if not familiar with the term |
Harvey Blume
If the authors had shown even a modicum of common sense, they might have made some pertinent enquiries. They might have found out that I corresponded with Harvey Blume for many years from 1997 onwards. Indeed I believe I shared this information years ago with Chapman. I need tech support to get back into my archives, but I can't afford it, as I already explained. I have retained my correspondence with Blume, which shows, unsurprisingly, that he was a jobbing journo and knew nothing about disability politics or the Social Model of Disability until I educated him to the extent that he cared. He learned the term "neurodiversity" from me. He wrote about it once or twice and never again. He did not cite me, nor, was he, as an op-ed writer, was he required to do so.
My rivals have even turned his ommission into another scourge to beat me with. It did not bother me in the least at the time. Because, who knew that 20 years later, the Neurodiversity movement I aimed to promote would actually go viral?
Sleuths, private eyes, legal eagles are welcome to peruse these documents, even carbon date them if they want, but I'm damned if I'm going to go to the expense of paying for carbon dating myself because of this scoundrelous crew.
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| Transcript of correspondence with Blume in which I mention Neurodiversity prior to his being |
''the first to publish''.
I use the term with him freely because I had already talked to him about it on the phone.
I use the term with him freely because I had already talked to him about it on the phone.
Where I said ''that I'm sure I coined Neurodiversity'' I also stated that the concept was probably ''in the air'' aka "the zeitgeist". I said the same thing in my thesis.
All paradigm shifting ideas arise from the zeitgeist, but it takes a theorist to name, explicate and analyse them first.
But I wasn't about to bignote myself then - nor did I ever dream that my idea would 'take off'. I make no apologies.Unlike my competitors, I was not all agog for academic glory and fame. I was simply writing from my heart about my "lived experience". Indeed, Chapman asks why I didn't lay claim to the coinage. It says more Chapman's ambitious ego than mine
So why did I go back to university at all?
Because I was a sole parent of a toddler who needed a lot more care than most. Who knew we had autism in the family way back then? So I could not work regular hours, not least because most of the money I earned would be seized by Australia's punitive welfare system anyway. Thanks to the pandering idiots of our major parties, the effect was to create a HUGE disincentive to work and employment. Meanwhile, on the other hand, going to university meant that I got an extra $30 a week supplement to the carers pension. And something meaningful to do.
When people asked me what I "majored" in, I joked - though it was no joke - that I majored in anything scheduled on Wednesdays, because that was the only day my father had free to babysit my child.
The Jane Meyerding libel
So, re my rivals meanspirited claims, I hope this crew will not seize upon my reticence as they seized on a conversation I had with Jane Meyerding when I asked her if she had ever heard the term "Neurodiversity". I asked her because
- she had been in the USA mainstream of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Movement long before me.
- I didn't want to claim the coinage until I was absolutely sure that the word didnt exist. I had exhausted all the resources of university libraries, the internet and never found it.
Notice that my defamers interpreted my correspondence with Jane in a twisted and mean-spirited way. Perhaps it is because they imagine I think the same way as they do? Apparently they do not feel the need to check in with others before they make their self-promoting claims.
Blume
It is frankly galling to find Blume getting equal billing with me in the history of the movement, when he was simply a freelance journalist specialising in interviewing literary figures.
Blume mentioned "neurodiversity" once, having picked my brain about disability politics, and moved on to chase other rabbits. Meanwhile, the development of this concept was my life's work, born out of great family hardship and struggle and my fortuitous discovery of Disability Studies. And it was NOT written just for the sake of personal catharsis, but also because I didn't want other families affected by Autism to have to endure the same.
Nor do journalistic ethics or the laws of defamation appear to daunt the Wikipedia crew, whose hogwash has been lapped up by my academic rivals. Hardly surprising, since they well know that defamation cases can only be afforded by corporations and billionaire
Nor do journalistic ethics or the laws of defamation appear to daunt the Wikipedia crew, whose hogwash has been lapped up by my academic rivals. Hardly surprising, since they well know that defamation cases can only be afforded by corporations and billionaire
The Final Absurdity
How could this example of blundering "logic" possibly have got past the learned editors of Sage Publications?
Botha, Chapman and Walker, having made up their minds, for whatever dubious reason, that the term Neurodiversity could only be attributed to anyone else but me came up with this gem of illogic.
"Unless further archival evidence comes to light, it is possible we will never know who coined the term neuurodiversity"
(Botha, Chapman, Walker et al)
All I can say in reply to this absurdity is that if it wasn't me then it could only have been coined by
'Turtles all the Way Down''
And now, a note on
((( ENVY )))
Albeit note the time-dishonoured sexism I have been forced to correct below.
And finally, a useful lesson from our ancient sages
tho I was forced to adapt it as below
_______________________________________________________
Bibliography
The Provenance of the Neurodiversity ConceptJudy Singer
*Thesis
Singer, J. (1998).
Odd People In: The Birth of Community Amongst People on the “Autistic
Spectrum”: a personal exploration of a New Social Movement based on Neurological
Diversity. A thesis presented to the faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts
Social Science (Honours), Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, University
of Technology, Sydney, 1998. Submitted September 1998.
Book
Singer, J. (2016) NeuroDiversity: The birth of an idea. Kindle https://www.amazon.com/NeuroDiversity-Birth-Idea-Judy-Singer-ebook/dp/B01HY0QTEE/
Book Chapters
Singer, J. (1999). Why can't you be
normal for once in your life?: From a 'Problem with No Name' to a new category
of disability. In Corker, M. and French, S. (Eds.). Disability Discourse Open
University Press UK https://www.worldcat.org/title/disability-discourse/oclc/39182312
Singer, J. (2002). When Cassandra was
very very young. In Rodman, K. (Ed.) (2002) Is anybody listening?
Jessica Kingsley Publishers, UK
Singer, J. (2003). Preface: Travels in Parallel
Space: An Invitation. In Miller, J. K. (ed). Women from Another Planet? Our
Lives in the Universe of Autism 1stBooks Library, New York
Singer, J. (2019) Reflections on the Neurodiversity
Movement 20 years on. In Neurodiversity: 20th anniversary of the birth of the
concept: Advocacy for
positive recognition of human diversity and its future available https://www.etsy.com/ca-fr/listing/701221413/neurodiversity-20th-anniversary-of-the?
Translation available at La
Neurodiversitรฉ - 20e anniversaire de la naissance d'un concept:
Plaidoyer pour la reconnaissance positive de la diversitรฉ humaine et pour son
avenir https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/688599087/neurodiversity-20th-anniversary-of-the?
Government Publication
Singer, J. (2000). Disability
Employment Services Information Kit. Department of Family and Community Services,
Australian Government publication (Comprises 8 illustrated booklets, half in
Easy English and half in Pictorial English, fact sheets and posters. 50,000
copies in print, distributed to every Disability Employment Service office in
Australia)
Academic papers
Singer, J. (1999). No Longer Fair
Game: Human Rights for Nerds, Weirdoes and Oddballs: The current situation of
people with Autistic Spectrum Disorders in the NSW education system. A paper
given at the 1999 Conference on Human Rights, Disability, and Education at the
University of NSW.
Singer, J. (1999). Uncovering the
Neurological Procrustean Bed. A paper given to the "Sydney Disability
Research Network". University of Technology, Sydney
Singer, J. (1999). Voice and
“Neurological Difference”. A seminar
paper given to the "Sydney Disability Research Network" UTS
Satirical Pieces
Singer, J. (1998) NT Social Skills
Deficiencies: A case study available archived online by Eric Engdahl at The
Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical https://erikengdahl.se/autism/isnt/
Singer, J. (1998) What to do if you suspect
your child has NT available archived online by Eric Engdahl at The
Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical https://erikengdahl.se/autism/isnt/
Debut Appearance of the Word “Neurodiversity”
Singer, J (1997) Mentioned by Judy Singer in private email to Harvey Blume. Correspondence archived, pictured above.
Blume, H (1998) On
the Neurological Underpinnings of Geekdom The Atlantic Monthly: September
1998
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