Available from Amazon for £14.99
My Review
I’ve come across Nick Walker’s work before, seen neurocosmopolitan and Neuroqueer referenced by other writers, and used Walker’s list of definitions in my own work, particularly the heritage project I’m working on – many people are unfamiliar with neurodiversity, the concept, paradigm and movement, and the vocabulary tha to has developed around it – but I hadn’t done more than skim until someone suggested we read some of her work for a Narratives of Neurodiversity Network Salon. Since I like to support small presses, I bought a copy of Walker’s book.
I’m very glad I did. I’ve spent a decent amount of time reading and cogitating in the contents. I am slightly annoyed to find that the ideas I thought I had that were original have actually been thought before, and articulated more elegantly than I could have done.
Although the stars and constellations metaphor is still mine and mine alone. So far as I know.
Nick Walker has been part of the neurodiversity movement for the last couple of decades, and knows people who were there at the beginning when autistic people started meeting and building culture online. She coined a lot of the words, or knows the people who did, and gives difinative histories and meanings for the words. This book also goes on to explain concepts like neurocosmopolitan and Neuroqueer in ways that people can understand. With examples.
I’m donating a new, un-Rosie-marked copy of this book to the little autistic library I’m building at my work. I think it’ll be helpful in giving people a different way of looking at their diagnosis and understanding of themselves through the neurodiversity paradigm rather than the pathology paradigm.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 