We are delighted to share 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
This presentation examines how rhetorics of fixation structure popular understandings of what it means to be transgender. Among other questions, I explore how psychiatric self-help content frequently deploys the rhetorical tactics of anti-trans gatekeepers in its curation of fixation. These rhetorical tactics by and large understand transness as a pathological cultural obsession, as perseveration run amok.
In turning to trans-mad rituals, I am less interested in how anti-trans actors cultivate the personal transformation of their newfound bigoted cohorts than I am in thwarting these actors’ demolition of trans life. How might we narrate the nuances of trans-mad distress, joy, pain, and obsession in ways that ensure trans-mad futures? How might we ethically respond to rhetorics of distress in a politically charged milieu that actively hinders living and thriving for trans and neurodivergent people?
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, performing with Claudia Palazzo
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.
Claudia Palazzo (she/her) is a London born artist working at the intersections and contradictions of dance, performance art, installation and alternative cabaret. It is often poetic, unmanageable, meditative and violent in its structure. Influenced by roots in nightclub culture, inner-city structures and psychophysical training. Her work often exists in a place of tension using the interplay between inherent strength and the impact of damage. Using embodiment and the live experience as a way of allowing transference and mutual recognition with each other and with objects as a way of processing and harnessing the power of a temporary community. Claudia is often preoccupied with how we embody things we don’t talk about and how dancing can exist as mystery, affirmation and transformation. Her work is concerned with alternatives to individualism whilst also trying to decensor her autobiography. Claudia is currently looking for things to represent her dancing body in her absence and wonders how we can challenge ableist ideals of mobility without succumbing to soft control that is disguised as care. Claudia has also had a 15+ year career as a performer in the work of many artists and choreographers.
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
When arguing that neurodiversity entails a different perception and understanding of the world, what world or worlds are we referring to? How can we describe these worlds without employing neurotypical frameworks of reference and staying true to the experience? This talk will offer such a way by focusing on compulsive affects, urges, and action. Taking a spatial approach and employing postphenomenological and post-humanist theories, and seeing compulsions as body-world relations, I critically deconstruct neurotypical environments to then reconstruct compulsive worlds. These worlds consist of multiple kinds of dynamic material constellations that require compulsive affirmation, stabilisation, and disruption. This work is based on narrative and multiple ethnographic methods and was conducted as collaborative research with 15 Tourettic people who also had autistic, ADHD, OCD, anxiety, and depression sensibilities. As such, this work contributes to critical neurodiversity studies a set of ordering principles within the neurodivergent experiential realm.
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.
In anticipation of their forthcoming edited collection, editors and contributors reflect on the core questions addressed in the volume: what would a neurodivergent critical framework for literary studies look like? How might we move beyond tracing representations of neurodivergence in literature and culture and questions of mimesis and authenticity, to consider how neurodivergence operates at the level of text in literary and cultural enquiry?
Pannellists: Jenny Bergenmar, Louise Creechan, Anna Stenning, Leni Van Goidsenhiven, Abs Ashley, Liselotte Van der Gucht, Sarinah O’Donoghue, Alice Hagopian, Laura Seymour
Respondent: Ria Cheyne
How Critical is Critical Neurodiversity Studies? Reflecting on Intersectional Privilege, Self-(a)criticality and Micro-Politics
Chair: Dyi Dieuwertje Huijg
Participants: To be confirmed
This open roundtable ‘How Critical is Critical Neurodiversity Studies? Reflecting on Intersectional Privilege, Self-(a)criticality and Micro-Politics’ offers an opportunity to critically reflect on Critical Neurodiversity Studies. Rather than merely focussing on ideas, the panellists will talk with each other about what doing Critical Neurodiversity Studies actually means and requires, and the audience is invited to contribute too. This roundtable starts with the realisation that Critical Neurodiversity Studies requires a theory and a praxis of intersectional social justice at various levels: the field, the ‘group’ as well as the interpersonal and personal levels. This implies that we have to address the tension between critically thinking about neurodiversity and critically doing neurodiversity studies. Specifically, this panels raises that such criticality requires us to intersectionally reflect on the role of privilege, self-criticality and the lack thereof, and the micro-politics of those doing the (critical) study of neurodiversity, and on the implications these doings and nondoings have on the field, on our interpersonal relations, and on us as individuals and, in turn, how that impacts what Critical Neurodiversity Studies ‘is’.
Topics that we might explore in the roundtable can be e.g.: (non-)accountability; playing lip service to intersectionality; not ‘walking the talk’; the tension between theoretical and empirical research; entitlement and structural privilege; prioritising neurodivergence and neuroableism over other social identities, inequalities and injustices; the difference between being challenged and being bullied; citational violence; gatekeeping; heroes and hero culture; vindictiveness and harm; and punitive versus transformative justice.