Rethinking Neurodevelopment: From WHO Policies to Neurodiversity and Care

Workshop
17 June 2025, 1:00 – 4:30pm BST
Simon Building, The University of Manchester, Room 2.57 (CHSTM Seminar Room)

Organisers:
Dr Cinzia Greco
Dr Bonnie Evans

Neurodevelopmental conditions have emerged over the past decades as key points of interest for psychological and neuroscientific research. This has generated new understandings of conditions such as autism, ADHD, and dyspraxia, alongside heated debates about overdiagnosis. As a result, neurodevelopmental conditions have become central to public discussions and have increasingly become focal points for political and social debate.

Recently, new technologically-driven social movements have generated novel perspectives on neurodevelopment and neurodiversity, also incorporating other axes of identity, such as gender. These have since come to the forefront of debates within the neurosciences in general. Questions arise as to how gender influences neurodevelopment and how far individual needs should be recognised and supported via policies in both national and international settings. Answers to these questions involve complex, yet still evolving, information from the fields of neuroscience and numerous other disciplines. However, neurodevelopmental conditions are not new. The history of autism, for example, dates back to the early twentieth century and the concept has undergone numerous transformations since this time. Key players in this evolution include international agencies, such as the WHO, as well as smaller activist groups. Their roles in this process, and the new understandings of developmental differences that they propose, have shaped new paradigms for considering human development and social interaction in general.

This interdisciplinary workshop offers an opportunity to discuss and rethink neurodevelopmental conditions, their historical and contemporary transformations, and to explore the future direction of research in this field.

Anna Stenning (she/they) is a researcher in the critical medical humanities. She is the author of Narrating the Many Autisms: Agency, Identity, Mattering (Routledge US, 2024) co-editor of Neurodiversity Studies: A New Critical Paradigm, with Hanna Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist and Nicholas Chown (Routledge UK, 2020).

Difference, Dependence, and Diversity: Neurodiversity Theory, Care Ethics, and the Politics of Pluralism

This talk brings together ecological models of neurodiversity, social justice frameworks, and care ethics. It explores how each offers different insights and limitations for understanding the experiences of those subject to neuromedical diagnoses. By placing these frameworks in dialogue, I argue for a more relational and pluralistic approach to neuromedical differences that values interdependence and challenges normative ideas of autonomy.

Bonnie Evans is Lecturer in the History of Medicine and Health at Manchester University. She is the author of The Metamorphosis of Autism (Manchester, 2017). She has published widely in the history of psychology and the neurosciences and she recently co-edited a volume of The History of the Human Sciences on ‘Film, Observation and the Mind’ (2024). She is currently writing a new book for Reaktion Press on the international history of neurodevelopmental diagnoses and their influence on changing approaches to childhood.

The World Health Organization and International Approaches to Neurodevelopment 1948-2024

When the World Health Organisation was founded in 1948, one of its aims was to develop novel methods to study neurodevelopment across different countries. Yet this ambitious international work was fraught with difficulties as the legacy of eugenics had encouraged a widespread scepticism of child development sciences amongst many international partners. This talk looks at how psychologists overcame this suspicion by using epidemiology and other sciences to develop universal diagnostic methods that went on to achieve widespread international acceptance, in particular autism and ADHD.

Cinzia Greco is a Mid-Career Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at The University of Manchester. After a PhD at the EHESS, she has been a British Academy Newton International Fellow and a Wellcome Trust Early-Career Fellow. She has conducted research on cancer, medical uncertainty, chronic conditions, and, more recently, mental health, gender and feminism.

Rewiring women’s brain: neurodiversity between neuroscience and neuro-sexism

Developments in neuroscience are crucial for our understanding of mental health. In this talk, I will explore feminist approaches within neuroscience, including those that have contributed to the emergence of neurofeminism. These approaches emphasize the concept of neurological plasticity, which may seem to contradict the neurodiversity paradigm that highlights “wired” cognitive differences among individuals. I explore ways in which neurofeminism and neurodiversity can be put in dialogue. Our understanding of the brain is incomplete and provisional, and these areas of uncertainty present a valuable opportunity for dialogue between the two perspectives.

Any questions? Please contact the Organisers.

cinzia.greco at manchester.ac.uk
bonnie.evans at manchester.ac.uk

CHSTM blog page: https://blogs.manchester.ac.uk/chstm/2025/04/24/rethinking-neurodevelopment-from-who-policies-to-neurodiversity-and-care/

Image credit: 9 artworks depicting the brain. Sarah Grice. Source: Wellcome Collection

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