We are delighted to announce our line-up of invited speakers, who will be joining us in-person for Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Directions/Intersections/Contradictions on 24–26 June 2025. We will continue to add to this page as more speakers and workshops are finalised.
Keynote Speakers
M. Remi Yergeau
Compulsively Yours: Ruminating on Trans-Mad Futures
M. Remi Yergeau (they/them/theirs) is an associate professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University. They are the author of Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness and one of many co-authors of Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal. Yergeau is currently at work on a few individual and collaborative projects that variously focus on anti-trans memes (with V. Jo Hsu), digital optimism (with the DISCO Network), as well as crip data and trans-mad perseveration (with lots of donuts). Presently, they serve as a co-PI for the DISCO Network, which receives support from the Mellon Foundation, and they are also a co-PI for “Crip Computing,” which receives support from the Mozilla Foundation’s Responsible Computing Challenge. Finally, and most importantly, Yergeau is obsessed with the Electric Light Orchestra (ELO).
Lisa Johnson
Making Things Perfectly Neuroqueer
Dr. Lisa Johnson (she/her) is a crip theorist, adoptive mom, and small dog fanatic. As Professor and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at University of South Carolina Upstate, she teaches courses on feminist disability studies, mad feminism, girlhood studies, and LGBTQ studies. Her current research focuses on neuroqueer feminism and borderline personality disorder, a controversial and historically feminized diagnosis that can be usefully reframed through the destigmatizing contexts of neuroqueer theory and feminist public health. With her co-author/co-editor, Robert McRuer, she has also created and explored the concept of cripistemologies in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies in a double issue in 2014 and a 10th anniversary issue in 2024. Her work has appeared in a variety of academic journals, including Signs, Discourse, Feminist Studies, Feminist Formations, Social Text, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Her books include Girl in Need of a Tourniquet, On the Literary Nonfiction of Nancy Mairs, Third Wave Feminism and Television, and Jane Sexes It Up.
Daniel Oliver
Performance Dork: Neurotransgressive Performance Lecture
This will be a participatory performance lecture adapted from Daniel’s Show Performance Dork, recontextualised for this Conference. It will be a dyspraxic-led exploration of magic, roleplay and a monotropic investment in experimental performance art that is part immersive fantasy show, part clothing optional improvised neurodivergent performance art chaos ritual, and part executively dysfunctional discussion space.
Flags: The piece has optional audience participation, possible nudity, loud noises, and mess.
Dr Daniel Oliver (he/him) is a lecturer at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London in the degree program Performance and Contemporary Art. His research, which is both practice-led and theoretical, focuses on the roles and experiences of neurodiversity in contemporary, experimental performance. Alongside his academic role, Daniel creates solo and collaborative performances that take a neurodivergent-led and wilfully calamitous approach to world-building, audience participation, immersion, comedy, and pretence. His performances and workshops have been presented throughout the United Kingdom and overseas for 20 years. His publications on awkwardness and neurodiversity include Awkwoods: Daniel Oliver’s Dyspraxic Adventures in Participatory Performance, published by the Live Art Development Agency.
Invited Speakers
Abs Ashley
Divergent (A)socialities and Textualities in Post-Truth Landscapes
Dr Abs S. Ashley (they/them) is Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. Their work explores the intersections of neurodivergence, gender dissidence and sociality in contemporary literature. Abs’s monograph Entangled Textualities, is forthcoming, and their research has been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Autism, and Neurodivergent Connection among other places.
Diana Beljaars
Spatialising Neurodiversity: Compulsive Geographies
Dr Diana Beljaars (she/her) is a research associate at the Swansea University Medical School. She is interested in spatial manifestations of medicalised phenomena, as well as the knowledge formation and institutional responses to them. As such, her work draws on human geography, medical humanities, continental philosophy, disability studies, and compulsion-related neuropsychiatry. Currently, she mostly works on mechanisms of (in)access to primary and emergency care for marginalised groups and sits on the Ministerial Advisory Group for Neurodiversity in Wales. In her first monograph Compulsive Body Spaces (Routledge, 2022) she set out a spatial theory for Tourettic compulsion. Her work also appears in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Developmental medicine and Child Neurology, GeoHumanities, and she co-edited Civic Spaces and Desire (Routledge, 2019).
Book Launch: Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Divergent Textualities in Literature and Culture
Panel discussion with Jenny Bergenmar, Louise Creechan, Anna Stenning and contributors.
Workshops: TBC