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Workshop: Neurodiversity and Neurodivergence: The epistemic, political, and ethical dimensions of conceiving differences versus deficits, 10-11 October 2024
10-11 October 2024
The workshop brings together philosophers whose work pertains to research on neurodiversity or has implications for our understanding of it. The neurodiversity movement emerged in the early 1990s as a joint action of activist autistic individuals who, through online connections, began raising awareness of various problems associated with the dominant understanding of different conditions such as autism. For instance, “they began to argue that perhaps the problems they all experienced had less to do with their brains being broken, and more to do with societal failure to accommodate their neurological differences (R. Chapman, Empire of Normality, p. 4). However, despite the movement's relatively long existence and a few exceptions in the field (notably the works of Ian Hacking, Victoria McGeer, and Robert Chapman), philosophy lags behind in embracing the significant shift in perspectives advocated by the neurodiversity movement. Fields such as philosophy of mind, epistemology, political philosophy, and ethics are directly impacted by this change in perspective on how we conceive and characterize people’s minds and the social nature of our interpersonal interactions. The objective of this workshop is to address this gap and further advance our understanding of neurodiversity.