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Spotlight Learning Collections: Experiences of Neurodivergence
Information about the current 2025-2026 Spotlight Learning Collections and links to additional resources.
About Spotlight Learning: Experiences of Neurodivergence
The Library opened its Sensory Friendly Space in Summer 2024, and this collection is designed to support and augment its mission. Including a variety of resources about neurodivergency, autism, ADHD, and other neurological and developmental conditions, as well as materials related to disability studies and justice more broadly, this collection seeks to focus on Own Voice resources as much as possible, i.e. books written about neurodivergency by people who identify as neurodivergent.
The print collection was funded, in part, through a UW Libraries Kenneth S. and Faye G. Allen Library Endowment Award.
Relevant research tools
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Disability in the Modern World This link opens in a new windowInterdisciplinary collection of primary documents, periodicals and video resources.
E-books & e-resources
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Activist Affordances
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ISBN: 9781478023876Publication Date: 2023For people who are living with disability, including various forms of chronic diseases and chronic pain, daily tasks like lifting a glass of water or taking off clothes can be difficult if not impossible. Arseli Dokumac draws on ethnographic work with differently disabled people whose ingenuity, labor, and artfulness allow them to achieve these seemingly simple tasks. -
Advances in Disability Research Ethics
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ISBN: 9781787693111Publication Date: 2024Experienced researchers from the field examine processes of disablement and the specificities which arise when researching the lives of people with physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments. Authors also incorporate social factors such as gender, ethnicity and age and how they interact with disability. -
Authoring Autism
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ISBN: 9780822372189Publication Date: 2018M. Remi Yergeau defines neurodivergence as an identity--neuroqueerness--rather than an impairment. Using a queer theory framework, Yergeau notes the stereotypes that deny autistic people their humanity and the chance to define themselves while also challenging cognitive studies scholarship and its reification of the neurological passivity of autistics. -
Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories from the Frontline
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ISBN: 9789811384370Publication Date: 2019Contains 19 chapters by 21 authors about the forming of the autistic community and neurodiversity movement, progress in their influence on the broader autism community and field, and their possible threshold of the advocacy establishment. -
Care Work
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ISBN: 9781551527390Publication Date: 2018Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of color are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a tool kit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. -
Centering Diverse Bodyminds in Critical Qualitative Inquiry
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ISBN: 9781003033264Publication Date: 2021Centering Diverse Bodyminds in Critical Qualitative Inquiry directly responds to the call for engaging in a new critical qualitative inquiry with consideration to issues related to power, privilege, voice, identity, and agency, while examining the hegemonic power of ableism and ableist epistemologies. -
Cripping Girlhood
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ISBN: 9780472904426Publication Date: 2024Cripping Girlhood offers a new theorization of disabled girlhood, tracing how and why representations of disabled girls emerge with frequency in twenty-first century U.S. media culture. It uncovers how the exceptional figure of the disabled girl most often appears as a resource to work through post-Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) anxieties about the family, healthcare, labor, citizenship, and the precarity of the bodymind. -
Disability and the History of Science
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ISBN: 9780226835624Publication Date: 2024This volume places disability history and the history of science in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scientists, and disability sciencing (engagement with scientific tools and processes). -
Disability in Dialogue
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ISBN: 9789027249494Publication Date: 2023What would it mean to invite disability into dialogue? Disability in Dialogue attunes us to the dialogues of and about disability. In the pages of this book, we ask readers to consider the dialogic constitution of disability and to imagine its reformulation. -
Disability Services in Higher Education
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ISBN: 9781439923474Publication Date: 2023Disability Services in Higher Education is the first comprehensive guide for people working in the field of ADA compliance in higher education. The authors examine how disabilities are supported to ensure students receive appropriate accommodations throughout their collegiate experience as well as provide guidance on overall campus accessibility. -
Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities
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ISBN: 9781496201676Publication Date: 2017Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities employs interdisciplinary perspectives to examine such issues as slow violence, imperialism, race, toxicity, eco-sickness, the body in environmental justice, ableism, and other topics. With a historical scope spanning the seventeenth century to the present, this collection not only presents the foundational documents informing this intersection of fields but also showcases the most current work, making it an indispensable reference. -
Disability Visibility
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ISBN: 9781984899439Publication Date: 2020A groundbreaking collection of first-person writing on the joys and challenges of the modern disability experience: Disability Visibility brings together the voices of activists, authors, lawyers, politicians, artists, and everyday people whose daily lives are, in the words of playwright Neil Marcus, "an art . . . an ingenious way to live." -
Disability, Intersectional Agency, and Latinx Identity
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ISBN: 9781000413922Publication Date: 2021This interdisciplinary volume links dis/ability and agency by exploring LatDisCrit's theory and activist emancipatory practice. It uses the author's experiential and analytical views as a blind brown Latinx engaged scholar and activist from the global south living and struggling in the highly racialized global north context of the United States. -
DisCrit
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ISBN: 9780807756676Publication Date: 2015This groundbreaking volume brings together major figures in Disability Studies in Education (DSE) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) to explore some of today's most important issues in education. Scholars examine the achievement/opportunity gaps from both historical and contemporary perspectives, as well as the overrepresentation of minority students in special education and the school-to-prison pipeline. -
Disrupting Ableism and Advancing STEM: Promoting the Success of People with Disabilities in the STEM Workforce
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ISBN: 9780309710381Publication Date: 2024People with disabilities are the largest minority group in the United States. In collection of workshop presentations, dozens of panelists spoke about their personal and professional experiences of ableism and barriers to full participation in the STEM workforce, as well as identified positive examples of mentorship and efforts to create fully inclusive STEM spaces in education, labs, the private sector, and professional development settings. -
Dyslexia
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ISBN: 9780228014362Publication Date: 2022In this first comprehensive history of dyslexia, Philip Kirby and Margaret Snowling chart a journey that begins with Victorian medicine and continues to dyslexia's current status as the most globally recognized specific learning difficulty. -
Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness
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ISBN: 9781839980473Publication Date: 2022Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness examines the role of embodied disablement in providing an important but often circumvented analysis of the explicit and implicit nature of the legitimate human body, its symbolism, and responses that such bodies elicit from diverse local through global social and cultural entities. -
Enablers, Barriers, and Challenges for Inclusive Curriculum
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ISBN: 9798337310008Publication Date: 2025Enablers, Barriers, and Challenges for Inclusive Curriculum examines the impact of enablers and barriers on education for students and teachers. It discusses promoting inclusive curriculum in face-to-face, online, and blended learning environments. -
The Equity Mindset
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ISBN: 9781394152216Publication Date: 2023Learn to implement the intentional practices and make the hard decisions that true equity demands In The Equity Mindset, celebrated researcher, attorney, and activist Ifeomasinachi Ike delivers a moving and impactful exploration of why equity is so important, the shortcomings of institutional diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives, and how we creatively and boldly design cultures centering the expertise of those who know first-hand how inequity has shaped work culture. -
Gaming Disability
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ISBN: 9780367357153Publication Date: 2022This book explores the opportunities and challenges people with disabilities experience in the context of digital games from the perspective of three related areas: representation, access and inclusion, and community. Drawing on key concerns in disability media studies, the book brings together scholars from disability studies and game studies, alongside game developers, educators, and disability rights activists, to reflect upon the increasing visibility of disabled characters in digital games. -
Gender Identity, Sexuality and Autism
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ISBN: 9781784505851Publication Date: 2019Bringing together a collection of narratives from those who are on the autism spectrum whilst also identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and/or asexual (LGBTQIA), this book explores the intersection of the two spectrums as well as the diverse experiences that come with it. -
Hands on Dyspraxia: Developmental Coordination Disorder
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ISBN: 9780429438998Publication Date: 2019This updated new edition is a practical guidebook for parents, teachers and other professionals supporting children with sensory and motor learning difficulties. It offers an understanding of developmental coordination disorder (DCD), and the impact that this can have in both home and school settings. -
How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind
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ISBN: 9781478010876Publication Date: 2021"Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly." So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as "rage," and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms. -
Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism
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ISBN: 1452971226Publication Date: 2024How illness on social media reveals the struggle for care and access against ableism and stigma. Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism explores illness and disability in action on social media, analyzing several popular hashtags as examples of how illness figures in recent U.S. politics.
Streaming video
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Deej
Abandoned by his birth parents and unable to speak for himself, DJ Savarese ("Deej") found not only a loving family but also a life in words, which he types on a text-to-voice synthesizer. As he dreams of college, he confronts the terrors of his past, society's obstacles to inclusion and often paralyzing beauty of his own senses. In this first-of-its kind collaboration between a veteran filmmaker and a nonspeaking autistic, Robert Rooy and DJ share editorial control as they navigate the challenges of representing autism. -
Spectrum: Autism Animated
"Spectrum: Autism Animated" combines live action and animation to explore the inner sensory experience of autism. -
Understanding Neurodiversity at WorkNeurodiversity refers to neurological differences or neuro-variations such as autism, ADHD, Tourette's, dyslexia, among others. However, more generally it describes someone whose brain processes information differently to neurotypical individuals. About 1 in 5 people are neurodivergent. Many neurodivergent people have extraordinary abilities that can be harnessed and valued in an inclusive environment with appropriate recruitment and training, and supportive managers and teams.
E-books & e-resources
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Imagining Autism
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ISBN: 9780253018137Publication Date: 2015A disorder that is only just beginning to find a place in disability studies and activism, autism remains in large part a mystery, giving rise to both fear and fascination. Sonya Freeman Loftis's groundbreaking study examines literary representations of autism or autistic behavior to discover what impact they have had on cultural stereotypes, autistic culture, and the identity politics of autism. -
Improving Inclusive Education Through Universal Design for Learning
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ISBN: 9783030806576Publication Date: 2021This open access, international scientific study provides an analysis of how the educational strategy of Universal Design for Learning can stimulate the process of inclusive education in different educational-cultural contexts and different areas of the educational system. -
Inclusive Localities
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ISBN: 9783847419549Publication Date: 2024The contributions in this book shed critical light on the shaping, negotiation, and creation of inclusive conditions of local authorities and localities. -
Indigenous Disability Studies
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ISBN: 9781032656502Publication Date: 2024This book provides a comprehensive approach to the perspectives, lived experiences, and socio-cultural beliefs of Indigenous scholars regarding disabilities through a distinctions-based approach. -
Looking after Your Autistic Self
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ISBN: 9781839975615Publication Date: 2023Niamh Garvey offers tips and tricks designed to reduce sensory and emotional stress and look after your autistic self. From understanding what's happening when the stress response kicks in to using the 'detective habit' to spot your individual strengths and triggers. -
Neurodiversity Studies
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ISBN: 9780429322297Publication Date: 2020Building on work in feminist studies, queer studies and critical race theory, this volume challenges the universality of propositions about human nature, by questioning the boundaries between predominant neurotypes and 'others', including dyslexics, autistics and ADHDers. -
Neuroqueer Heresies
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ISBN: 9781945955273Publication Date: 2021Neuroqueer Heresies collects a decade's worth of Dr. Walker's most influential writings, along with new commentary by the author and new material on her radical conceptualization of Neuroqueer Theory. -
A People's Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice
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ISBN: 9798887440408Publication Date: 2024Disability justice and prison abolition are two increasingly popular theories that overlap but whose intersection has rarely been explored in depth. A People's Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice explains the history and theories behind abolition and disability justice in away that is easy to understand for those new to these concepts yet also gives insights that will be useful to seasoned activists. -
The Reason I Jump
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ISBN: 9780812994865Publication Date: 2013Written by Naoki Higashida, a very smart, very self-aware, and very charming thirteen-year-old boy with autism, it is a one-of-a-kind memoir that demonstrates how an autistic mind thinks, feels, perceives, and responds in ways few of us can imagine. -
Sensory: Life on the Spectrum
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ISBN: 9781524874766Publication Date: 2022A colorful and eclectic comics anthology exploring a wide range of autistic experiences--from diagnosis journeys to finding community--from autistic contributors. From artist and curator Bex Ollerton comes an anthology featuring comics from thirty autistic creators about their experiences of living in a world that doesn't always understand or accept them. -
Signs of Disability
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ISBN: 9781479811175Publication Date: 2022This book centers on story as a means of making disability available for noticing. The framework of signs of disability forwarded in this book is drawn from the author's lived experience of disability and deafness as well as rhetoric, feminist materialist scholarship, and critical disability studies. -
Sixty Years of Visible Protest in the Disability Struggle for Equality, Justice, and Inclusion
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ISBN: 9781009497923Publication Date: 2024Visible protests reflect both continuity and change. This book illustrates how protest around longstanding issues and grievances is punctuated by movement dynamics as well as broader cultural and institutional environments. The disability movement is an example of how activist networks and groups strategically adapt to opportunity and threat, linking protest waves to the development of issue politics. -
Space, Education, and Inclusion: Interdisciplinary Approaches
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ISBN: 9781032321356Publication Date: 2024This timely, edited volume brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on space and spatiality in inclusive education discourses. -
Swallow Me Whole
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ISBN: 9781603090339Publication Date: 2008In his Eisner-Award-winning breakthrough, Nate Powell quietly explores the dark corners of adolescence - the countless tiny moments of madness, the vague relief of medication, and mixed blessing of family ties. Swallow Me Wholeis a love story carried by rolling fog, terminal illness, hallucination, apophenia, insect armies, secrets held, unshakeable faith, and the search for a master pattern to make sense of one's unraveling. -
The Autism Industrial Complex
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ISBN: 9781975501846Publication Date: 2024Within capitalism, the Autism Industrial Complex (AIC) produces both autism as commodity and the methods of intervention to deal with it. Comprised of ideological, rhetorical, material, and economic infrastructures, the AIC is not only a variety of businesses and industries that capitalize and profit from it. In the production of autism as commodity, the AIC also produces that commodity's market, its consumers, and its monopoly control of that market through production for consumption of need for, consent to, and legitimacy of interventionist logics. -
The Future Is Disabled
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ISBN: 9781551528915Publication Date: 2022In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if the majority of people will be disabled in the near future - and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom become crucial if we're going to create a future where surviving fascism, climate change, and pandemics and creating liberation are possible? -
The Palgrave Handbook of Research Methods and Ethics in Neurodiversity Studies
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ISBN: 9783031661266Publication Date: 2024This timely volume brings together well-established scholars and emerging voices to explore research methods and ethics in Neurodiversity Studies. It explores the epistemic injustice that currently surrounds much knowledge production around neurodivergence, and offers concrete examples of creative, participatory, and collaborative research practice in the field. -
The Struggle You Can't See
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ISBN: 9781805113744Publication Date: 2024This book offers a comprehensive review of current research on the higher education experiences of neurodivergent undergraduate students and those with invisible disabilities. Grounded in principles of social justice and equity, this work draws from design thinking, the neurodiversity model, and Universal Design for Learning, to explore the context of higher education in relation to neurodivergent and disabled students. -
The Unteachables
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ISBN: 9781517910273Publication Date: 2023The Unteachables examines the overrepresentation of Black students in special education over the course of the twentieth century. As African American children integrated predominantly white schools, many were disproportionately labeled educable mentally retarded (EMR), learning disabled (LD), and emotionally behavioral disordered (EBD). Keith A. Mayes charts the evolution of disability categories and how these labels kept Black learners segregated in American classrooms. -
Understanding Autism
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ISBN: 9780443273667Publication Date: 2024Understanding Autism: Perspectives, Assessment, Interventions, and the Journey Toward Inclusion is a compelling book offering a multifaceted examination, providing readers with a comprehensive understanding of autism spectrum disorder from both biological and social perspectives. -
Unmasking Autism
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ISBN: 9780593235249Publication Date: 2022Dr. Devon Price shares his personal experience with masking and blends history, social science research, prescriptions, and personal profiles to tell a story of neurodivergence that has thus far been dominated by those on the outside looking in. -
The World of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
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ISBN: 9781479881406Publication Date: 2022Dana Fennell explores the lives of people who have OCD, giving us fresh insight into a highly misunderstood, trivialized, and sometimes stigmatized mental disorder that has no surefire cure. Drawing primarily on interviews with people who have OCD, Fennell shows us the diversity of ways the disorder manifests, when and why people come to perceive themselves as having a problem, what treatment options they pursue, and how they make sense of and manage their lives.
