Rethinking ADHD: Voices from Research, Practice and Lived Experience is a podcast mini-series produced for the British Education Research Association (黑料不打烊), 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.
In the second half of the opening episode of Rethinking ADHD: Voices from Research, Practice and Lived Experience, we move beyond introducing Critical ADHD Studies to explore what this emerging field asks us to do differently. Building on the theoretical foundations discussed in Part 1, this conversation examines how dominant medical narratives have shaped what we think we know about ADHD, whose knowledge is valued, and what happens when we begin to question those assumptions.
Drawing on the work of Brown, Bertilsdotter Rosqvist and Jackson-Perry, the discussion explores the concepts of unknowing—the deliberate process of recognising the limits of accepted knowledge—and re-storying, inspired by Yergeau’s challenge to resist the “medicalised storying of lack”. Together, these ideas offer a way of understanding ADHD that centres lived experience, challenges deficit-based thinking and opens new possibilities for research, education and practice.
The episode also considers the recent call to action for Critical ADHD Studies, asking what researchers, educators, parents and policymakers might do differently if they began from the premise that current ways of knowing ADHD are incomplete. Rather than offering easy answers, the conversation ends by inviting listeners to reflect on what they may need to stop being certain about.
References & further resources
“The ADHD theory you’ve never heard of” by Jesse Meadows (YouTube video)
Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk
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.
“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.
Nair, V. K., Farah, W., & Boveda, M. (2026). Is neurodiversity a Global Northern White paradigm? Autism.
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...