Critical Neurodivergent Studies

Taxonomy of Terms

Place of record for CNS terms

The vocabulary of Critical Neurodivergent Studies, with a definition, provenance and citation for each term.

The taxonomy moves from the ground CNS stands on, through power, rhetoric and method, to affect, resistance and form. Each tier answers a different question: what neurodivergence is, how it is governed, how it is captured, how it speaks, how it reads, how it keeps time, how it resists, and what it makes.

Halftone collage of a stack of books

Every term carries a provenance line, so readers can see what CNS inherits and what it contributes:

  • Foundational. Inherited from the wider field and credited to its originators. CNS uses the term in the sense given.
  • Shared vocabulary. A term already in circulation that CNS develops in a specific way. The originators are credited, and the CNS specification is cited to this site.
  • CNS term. A term introduced within CNS. Where the term has been defined in a publication, that publication is cited as the source. Otherwise the term’s page is the definition of record.

Definitions are revised as the framework develops. A dated snapshot of each page is archived at each change, so any version can be cited. Where an entry gives a published source, cite that source and the term’s page together.

The organising framework

The model the rest of the vocabulary hangs from.

I. Ontological ground

What neurodivergence is, and the vocabulary CNS takes as given.

  • Neurodiversity · Foundational. The variation in neurocognitive functioning across the human species.
  • Neurodivergent, neurodivergence · Foundational. Having a mind that diverges significantly from dominant standards of normal neurocognition.
  • Neurotypical · Foundational. The dominant style of neurocognitive functioning, treated as normal.
  • Neurodiverse, neurohomogenous · Foundational. A group is neurodiverse when it contains more than one neurocognitive style, and neurohomogenous when it does not.
  • Neurominority, neuromajority · Foundational. A neurominority is a group who share a form of neurodivergence.

II. The governing paradigm

The two frames within which neurodivergence is understood.

III. Power and capture

How the norm is held in place, and what it takes.

  • Neuronormativity · Shared vocabulary. The set of assumptions, practices and institutional arrangements that establish one cognitive-affective style as the unmarked standard against which others are measured, managed and corrected.
  • Compulsory neurotypicality · Shared vocabulary. The social demand that people perform a normative cognitive and affective style as the price of being legible.
  • Neurocapitalism · Foundational. The conversion of divergent cognition into economic value.
  • Neurocapture · CNS term. The process by which divergent traits, labour and aesthetics are absorbed and extracted by neuronormative institutions on neurotypical terms.
  • Masking · Foundational. The suppression or camouflage of neurodivergent traits in order to pass or be accepted, usually at significant cost to the person doing it.
  • Triple masking · CNS term. The concurrent maintenance of three regimes of concealment, whose costs compound rather than simply add up.

IV. Rhetoric, voice and standing

Who is heard, and on what terms. These terms come from M. Remi Yergeau’s Authoring Autism (2018) and are grounded in autistic rhetoric. CNS uses them with that specificity in view and marks any wider application explicitly.

  • Demi-rhetoricity · Foundational. The clinical and social logic that treats autistic people as only partially rhetorical, and so never fully able to make claims about their own lives.
  • Elliptic rhetoric · Foundational. The way non-autistic listeners hear autistic speech as incomplete, and supply what they take to be missing before it can count.
  • Kakokairos · Foundational. The out-of-step timing of autistic rhetoric, which does not meet neurotypical expectations of the opportune moment and place.
  • Autistexts · Foundational. Autistic life writing that works intertextually to bear witness and to protest, moving past solitary and pathological accounts of autism.
  • Double empathy problem · Foundational. Breakdowns in understanding between autistic and non-autistic people run in both directions, rather than reflecting an autistic deficit.

V. Reading and method

How CNS reads texts, and what it refuses to do with them.

  • Neuroaffective reading · CNS term. An embodied critical method that attends to how texts produce, regulate and divert affect across divergent reading bodies.
  • Neurocrip reading · CNS term. A reading practice that refuses cure narratives and recuperation, holding texts open to non-normative minds without resolving them into deficit or inspiration.
  • Critical Neuronormative Discourse Analysis (CNDA) · CNS term. Critical discourse analysis with neuronormativity as its ideological object.

VI. Affect, time and attention

How neurodivergent minds attend, keep time and come to know themselves.

  • Monotropism · Foundational. A model of attention in which interest is concentrated on few channels at a time, drawing resources away from others.
  • Crip time · Foundational. The flexible, non-normative relation to time lived by disabled people, and the reorientation of expectations about pace and schedule it demands.
  • Monster time · CNS term. The temporality kept by the monstrous child in children’s literature and media.
  • Autistic burnout · Foundational. Long-term exhaustion, loss of function and reduced tolerance to stimulus, resulting from chronic life stress and a mismatch between expectations and ability without adequate support.
  • Anagnorescence · CNS term. Recognition that arrives as a duration rather than an event.
  • Littorascene · CNS term. The intertidal zone, and the rock pool in particular, as a scene of neurodivergent attention: a place whose boundaries do not hold, read as a model for attentional and sensory experience.

VII. Resistance and world-making

What neurodivergent people do with divergence, and with each other.

  • Neuroqueer, neuroqueering · Foundational. A practice rather than a fixed identity: subverting neuronormativity and heteronormativity together, and reclaiming the potential of one’s divergence.
  • Neurocosmopolitanism · Foundational. Approaching neurodiversity with the humility and openness to transformation with which a cosmopolitan approaches cultural difference.
  • Postnormal · Foundational. The horizon beyond normality as a category.
  • Neurocrip · CNS term. The resistant position and analytic formed where neurodivergence meets crip theory.
  • Neurokinship · CNS term. Relationships of mutual recognition and support among neurodivergent people, whether or not formally diagnosed, grounded in shared ways of perceiving and processing.
  • Parallel co-presence · CNS term. Shared proximity without social demand.

VIII. Aesthetics and form

What divergence makes, and how to read it as made.

  • Stim poetics · CNS term. A reading practice that understands poetic repetition as stimming and stimming as composition.
  • Stim lit · CNS term. Prose whose form is self-stimulatory: writing in which repetition, accumulation, list and loop regulate the reading body as they compose the text.
  • Stim cinema · CNS term. A film aesthetics of repetition, texture and sensory pattern, understood as a divergent visual mode rather than as excess or indulgence.
  • Stim armature · CNS term. A worn object or structure that works as an external scaffold for self-regulation, through deep pressure, predictable sequence, sanctioned repetition or a scripted body.

References

Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, H., Chown, N., & Stenning, A. (Eds.). (2020). Neurodiversity studies: A new critical paradigm. Routledge.

Botha, M., Chapman, R., Giwa Onaiwu, M., Kapp, S. K., Stannard Ashley, A., & Walker, N. (2024). The neurodiversity concept was developed collectively: An overdue correction on the origins of neurodiversity theory. Autism, 28(6), 1591–1594.

Ezzy, T. (2020). Littorascene: Place-based writing from a world whose boundaries do not hold. Mudlark Press.

Ezzy, T. (2026). The body reads first: Neuroaffective reading as embodied critical method. M/C Journal, 29(4). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.3275

Ezzy, T. (2026). Uploading the mask: Late diagnosis, paternal loss, and the neurodivergent afterlife. M/C Journal, 29(3). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.3274

Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, queer, crip. Indiana University Press.

McRuer, R. (2006). Crip theory: Cultural signs of queerness and disability. New York University Press.

Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887.

Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156.

Pearson, A., & Rose, K. (2021). A conceptual analysis of autistic masking: Understanding the narrative of stigma and the illusion of choice. Autism in Adulthood, 3(1), 52–60.

Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Delos Santos, A., Kapp, S. K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A., & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). “Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew”: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143.

Samuels, E. (2017). Six ways of looking at crip time. Disability Studies Quarterly, 37(3).

Walker, N. (2012). Throw away the master’s tools: Liberating ourselves from the pathology paradigm. In J. Bascom (Ed.), Loud hands: Autistic people, speaking (pp. 225–237). Autistic Self Advocacy Network.

Walker, N. (2014). Neurodiversity: Some basic terms and definitions. Neuroqueer. https://neuroqueer.com/neurodiversity-terms-and-definitions/

Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.

Yergeau, M. R. (2018). Authoring autism: On rhetoric and neurological queerness. Duke University Press.