Family Portrait
Judy Singer is an Australian sociologist credited with coining the term“Neurodiversity” while completing an Honours Thesis at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) over the period of 1997 to 1998. Her thesis, subtitled “a personal exploration of a new social movement based on “neurological diversity”, was the first non-psychomedical academic work to map out what she realised might well be the last great civil rights movement to emerge from the 20th century. This new social movement would not be limited by the then recognised intersections of Ethnicity, Gender, Race, Disability etc, but on a new hitherto unrecognised subsection of disability. Her aim was first of all to broaden the scope of "Disability" by adding Neurodiversity (ND) as a new subcategory, which did not easily fit these limited categories. In doing so, she wanted to highlight that ND represented a spectrum condition. Her insights were based on the transition from "Modernism" - influenced by the particulate Newtonian science of the 20th century - to "Post-Modernism", which she saw emerging alongside the paradigm shift to quantum science and its free-flowing understanding of variation.Three generations of the Singer women "somewhere on the autistic spectrum"(as depicted by the baby woman back in 1994)NB: In the interest of transparency, I wrote this myself in the third person for ease of use for people seeking my biography.
This new social movement was based on the pioneering work of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Movement. But the autistics were being joined by other neurological minorities, people labelled with ADHD, Tourettes, and the "Dys"abilities... praxia, lexia, calculia. Clearly this movement needed a banner term. Singer, in an Aha! moment came up with "Neurodiversity".
At that time disability communities were largely viewed via the "Medical Model of Disability" which asked "What is wrong with this individuals mind/body?". But Singer's work was informed by the "Social Model of Disability" which asked "What are the societal beliefs and barriers that are preventing this individual from fully participating in society?" which was developed in the 1980s by northern academics like Michael Oliver, Lennard Davis and Tom Shakespeare, and further by Australian Professors Helen Meekosha, Andrew Jakubowicz (Singer's thesis supervisor) and Dr. Lynne Davis who taught a groundbreaking course on "Disability Studies" at UTS.
Again, we can see the paradigm shift to postmodernism, which focussed not on individual pathology, but on social flux shaping the phenomenon of change.
Again, we can see the paradigm shift to postmodernism, which focussed not on individual pathology, but on social flux shaping the phenomenon of change.
Singer's ideas grew out of her lived experience of outsiderhood in the middle of 3 generations of women, all of whom she then described as “somewhere on the autistic spectrum”.
Like many people “on the spectrum” and especially as a woman seeking work in the early 1970s, Judy experienced difficulty finding employment. Fortunately, like many autistics, she was able to find a career in the burgeoning new field of IT which opened up not only recognitions of "eccentric geniuses" up a new world of opportunities hitherto denied women, thanks to the urgent need for a new workforce,
When Judy became a parent with a child who appeared to have a “mysterious” disability, her carer responsibilities compelled her to give up her career. Instead she went back to University to pursue her true interests: anthropology and sociology.
Judy has a long career in voluntary community organizing: she was the founder, via the internet, of the world's first support group for people raised by autistic parent, became the secretary of Sydney’s largest support group for the parents of autistic children and as a co-founder of Sydney’s only independent social club for teenagers on the spectrum. She was elected a director of Shelter NSW, Australia’s peak body for housing justice but since the rediscovery of her work in 2017, she has been fully occupied with advocacy within the Neurodiversity discourse.
Vale: A personal note.
My mother Agnes passed away peacefully in 2016 at the age of 89. Agnes had lived with undiagnosed PTSD as a result of being an orphaned teenage survivor of Auschwitz.We had a troubled relationship which only healed when I began to understand the pressure she was under to mask her autism on top of survivor trauma. But whether Agnes was actually autistic, or whether it was a PTSD response, will never be known.
