Reflections on Abstract Selection
When we initially imagined this event, we thought that there would definitely be appetite for an event that would bring scholars working in critical neurodiversity studies from across the arts, humanities, and social sciences together.
But, we could not have anticipated the scale of the response that we received! And the breadth and diversity of the incredible work being done in this area.
We feel that it is important to be transparent about the abstract selection as we had to make some very difficult decisions.
We received 212 applications, but unfortunately, we could only accept 79 papers.
Why this number?
The conference team calculated this number as the maximum that we could accommodate in the schedule without making significant compromises on the accessibility of the event.
- We publicly stated our commitment to access and were led by these decisions.
- We wanted all panels to be fully hybrid. We discussed the possibility of additional ‘online-only streams’, but we felt that we would be introducing a hierarchy between those in the online-only streams and those in the four hybrid streams.
- Due to venue capacity and feasibility of recording the sessions (where agreed), four was the most we could confidently manage.
- While we have a number of additional rooms available to us during the conference, these rooms have designated purposes for delivering an inclusive event, including a networking room (with prompts supplied by our Creative Facilitation Unit), a quiet room, and a sensory room. We did not want to sacrifice these rooms or to fill the venue to absolute capacity, as this would make the event less accessible for our participants.
Our Process
Conference organisers scored the papers 1-5. This score was then added to the results of a round of blind peer-review, conducted by scholars from the field who did not have an abstract under consideration. These scores were used to rank the papers.
After the scores were collated, we held a final selection panel where author biographies were seen. We chose to follow-up the blind review with a seen panel to ensure that any additional contexts, such as career-stage, were taken into account. This panel was chaired by the Academic Business Partner of the Durham University EDI Team and a member of the Discovery Research Platform Management Group to enable researchers to discuss the abstracts and to ensure parity during the selection process.
Our Priorities
In our Call for Abstracts, we wanted to emphasise research that takes critical neurodiversity studies in new and/or unexpected areas. We wanted to ensure the broadest possible spread of disciplines and methodologies, as part of the hopes for this conference is to identify where critical neurodiversity studies is going and how these discourses intersect with other critical frameworks.
Specifically, we were looking for those papers that utilised the frameworks of arts/humanities/social sciences to explore neurodiversity as the driver of critique.
As a result, the following categorises of abstracts did not make it into the conference. The reasons are varied, and are elaborated on below:
- As we had committed to a large disciplinary spread, we chose the highest-scoring papers from popular disciplines and lost many papers of a high standard to give space to abstracts from a different discipline.
- Papers from the psy-disciplines that did not fit the neurodiversity paradigm or ‘ND-lite’ approaches. We did include some papers from psy-disciplines, if they utilised a non-pathologised approach.
- Those that focused on pedagogy or on the experiences of neurodivergent researchers in Higher Education
- We gave preference to work that prioritises neurodiversity, rather than specific diagnoses. Where we have accepted papers focused on diagnoses, we chose conditions that are under-represented in existing research. Papers on more frequently researched diagnoses, such as autism or ADHD, were only scored highly if it was felt that the approach was especially novel.
Once again, we were overwhelmed by the response to this conference and the standard of all the abstracts we received. This is clearly an exciting and pivotal moment for critical neurodiversity studies, and we look forward to seeing how all this research will enrich and develop the field!
The Conference Team
