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.
Dr Ana-Maria Butura Santos’’s research centres on masking in women and girls with ADHD, culminating in the development of the MASQ (Masking in ADHD Scale Questionnaire), the first ADHD-specific masking scale. Her dissertation work identified four distinct subtypes of masking behaviour (suppressing, adapting, hiding and compensating), documented a significant misalignment between DSM diagnostic criteria and the internal experience of ADHD as women describe it, and demonstrated that teacher ratings systematically fail to capture what girls’ own self-reports reveal, to the point where no girls in her study sample met teacher screening criteria for probable ADHD. Her current work on the ART-transition co-design project extends these findings into practice, centering lived experience in the design of ADHD support.
The episode brings the series’ ‘unknowing’ and epistemic threads directly to bear on the question of gender and diagnosis: whose version of ADHD has been centred in research and clinical practice, what the cost of that has been for girls and women, and what becomes possible when internal experience is taken as seriously as observable behaviour.
References and further reading:
Butura, A. (2025). ADHD in Girls and Women: The Significance of Subjective Perceptions, Inner Experiences, Context-Specific Symptoms, and Masking (Doctoral dissertation, King’s College London).
Kok, F. M., Groen, Y., Fuermaier, A. B., Tucha, O. and Christiansen, H. (2016). Problematic peer functioning in girls with ADHD: a systematic literature review. PLoS ONE, 11(11), e0165119.
Wilson, C., Green, C. N., Toye, M. K., & Ballantyne, C. (2024). Teachers’ perceptions and practices towards inclusive education for children with ADHD in Scotland: A qualitative investigation. International Journal of Disability, Development and Education, 71(7), 1061-1075.
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...
Ana-Maria Butura Santos is a researcher whose doctoral work developed the MASQ (Masking in ADHD Scale Questionnaire), the first ADHD-specific masking scale, through a study of masking in women and girls with ADHD that identified four distinct...