→ Judy Singer, "NeuroDiversity: The Birth of an Idea", 1998.
"Judy Singer’s 1998 thesis considers the emergence of the neurodiversity paradigm and the movement that resulted, with a specific focus on “high functioning Autism” and Asperger’s." [1]
→ Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, 2016.
"Peter Godfrey-Smith dons a wet suit and journeys into the depths of consciousness [...] Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how subjective experience crept into being—how nature became aware of itself." [2]
→ Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower, 1993.
“This post-apocalyptic novel by the award-winning American novelist Octavia E. Butler, is an odyssey of one woman who is twice as feeling in a world that has become doubly dehumanized. The time is 2025. The place is California, where small walled communities must protect themselves from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of people addicted to a drug that activates an orgasmic desire to burn, rape, and murder. When one small community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an 18 year old black woman with the hereditary train of “hyperempathy”—which causes her to feel others’ pain as her own—sets off on foot along the dangerous coastal highways, moving north into the unknown.” [3]
→ N. Katherine Hayles, How we became posthuman, 1999.
"In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the “bodies” that once carried it vanish into virtuality [...] In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age." [4]
→ Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, 2018.
"Sami Schalk traces how black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds—the intertwinement of the mental and the physical—in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability." [5]
→ Martin Sullivan and Hilary Stace, A brief history of disability in Aotearoa New Zealand, 2020
"A brief look at the history of disability in Aotearoa, since the advent of European settlement, as published on the website of the Office for Disability Issues Te Tarī Mō Ngā Take Hauātanga."
→ Link
→ Eduardo Kohn on How Forests Think – interview by American Library in Paris
"Can forests think? The driving force (and question) of anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think is quickly answered; yes, he writes, and other entities are capable of thought, too. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from the Runa people of Amazonian Ecuador, Kohn offers a different approach to anthropology, one that decenters the human from the field of research. Rather, he describes a landscape of relations among different beings–a landscape that at once involves and exceeds humans."
→ Link
→ Radio Lab: G Series
"Radiolab’s “G” is a multi-episode exploration of one of the most dangerous ideas of the past century: the concept of intelligence. Over six episodes, the series unearths the fraught history (and present-day use) of IQ tests, digs into the bizarre tale of one man’s obsessive quest to find the secret to genius in Einstein’s brain, reveals the ways the dark history of eugenics have crept up into the present, looks to the future with a controversial geneticist who has created a prenatal test for intelligence, and stages a raucous game-show throwdown to crown the smartest animal in the world."
→ Link
→ RNZ: Eugenics: the story of a really bad idea
"Did you know that, after the First World War, New Zealand established an official eugenics board? We tend to think of eugenics as being something the Nazis invented, but really it was embraced all around the world in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In this episode of Black Sheep, historian and disability researcher, Hilary Stace, traces the history of New Zealand's eugenicists."
→ Link
[1] Book review: Neurodiversity: The Birth of an Idea by Judy Singer. Reviewed by the Salvesen Mindroom Centre team.
[2] Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Macmillan Publishers.
[3] Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. Grand Central Publishing.
[4] How we became posthuman by N. Katherine Hayles. University of Chicago Press.
[5] Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction by Sami Schalk. Duke University Press.