Rethinking ADHD: Voices from Research, Practice and Lived Experience is a podcast mini-series produced for the British Education Research Association (BERA), bringing together researchers, practitioners and people with lived experience to explore what ADHD and neurodiversity really mean in educational settings, and what it would take to do better. Across six episodes, the series moves from the theoretical foundations of Critical ADHD Studies through questions of epistemic injustice, school culture, co-occurring conditions and the social world of neurodivergent young people, drawing on recent scholarship and the expertise of guests who have spent careers and lifetimes thinking about these questions.
This opening episode introduces the theoretical vocabulary that carries across the series. The CADS chapter by Brown, Bertilsdotter Rosqvist and Jackson-Perry (published in the Palgrave Handbook of Research Methods and Ethics in Neurodiversity Studies, 2024) maps the field from the pathology paradigm through the diagnosis-critical paradigm to the emerging CADS framework. Central to the episode are the concepts of ‘unknowing’ (developed in the volume by Jackson-Perry) and ‘re-storying’, drawn from Yergeau’s notion of resisting the ‘medicalized storying of lack’. The companion Disability and Society piece (2025) extends this into a forward-facing call to action. Brown is now a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Usher Institute, where his work spans neuroethics, disability studies and science and technology studies, including affirmative perspectives on ADHD beyond neurodiversity frameworks.
The episode addresses a mixed audience explicitly: researchers, practitioners, parents, students and those with lived experience. Questions build from the conceptual to the practical, closing by asking what the audience should stop being certain about.
References & further resources
“The ADHD theory you’ve never heard of” by Jesse Meadows (YouTube video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxbdAEAmbnU
Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk
https://www.dukeupress.edu/black-disability-politics
Brown, A.I., Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, H., Jackson-Perry, D. (2024). An Introduction to Critical ADHD Studies. In: Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, H., Jackson-Perry, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Research Methods and Ethics in Neurodiversity Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-66127-3_3
“Integrating Race, Transforming Feminist Disability Studies” by Sami Schalk and Jina Kim
Jackson-Perry, D., Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, H., & Brown, A. I. (2025). Moving forward: a call for Critical ADHD Studies. Disability & Society, 40(12), 3519–3524. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2025.2458016
Nair, V. K., Farah, W., & Boveda, M. (2026). Is neurodiversity a Global Northern White paradigm? Autism. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613241280835
Making Feminist Points https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/
Neurodiversity: A Very Short Introduction by Robert Chapman and Sue Fletcher-Watson
University of Cumbria
Dustin Hosseini works across health science, education and critical pedagogy as a Lecturer in Health Science at the Centre of Excellence in Paramedic Practice at the University of Cumbria, an Associate Tutor in the School of Education at the...
Andrew Ivan Brown is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society at the Usher Institute, University of Edinburgh, where his interdisciplinary work spans neuroethics, disability studies and science and technology studies. His...
Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist is Professor of Social Work at Karlstad University, Sweden, and a leading figure in neurodiversity studies whose research spans autism, ADHD and the lived experience of neurodivergence. Her collective...
David Jackson-Perry is an honorary lecturer at Queen's University Belfast, where his work centres on autism, ADHD, and neurodiversity, and a researcher and HIV project manager at Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), Switzerland. Active in the...