Is neurodiversity a Global Northern White paradigm? | Hacker News Reader

Is neurodiversity a Global Northern White paradigm?

doi.org

2 pointsMehticulous7 comments

Still reading the piece, but what stroke me while is how the notion of Global North/South has become weirder and weirder as international economy progresses.

I see how there's no magic bullet or really good term to express a notion of two groups of countries. But the metaphor gets really tired when Australia is part of the Global North and Taiwan or China are in the Global South.

I'm not versed enough in economy, but I'd wager Brazil and Mexico could also be controversial entries, if we had to compare them to Russia for instance.

I feel this is better addressed with terms like G20 which don't rely on any metaphor or imagery.

Not sure what to make of that. Please elaborate?

In the context of the article they're pretty clear about their sources and what they mean by global north and south.

Global North and South have clear definitions, but don't really match how we currently separate the different blocks.

For instance if we're addressing the amount of research on the autism spectrum or depression, I don't expect Russia or Australia to be significantly ahead of China or Brazil.

The same way putting Portugal and Brazil in different groups, but the UK and Australia in the same doesn't feel helpful.

There are many points in the article looking at colonization and Anglophony, these historical or cultural distinctions could be a better split perhaps IMHO. Or just embrace the complexity and not reuse any specific concept to group the countries they want to focus on.

They are deliberately using an inflammatory title and too-big terms for the constituencies they are describing. If they define the Global North as the United States and the UK, they should just say that. If by the Global South they mean India, they should just say that.

They do. Do they not? Isn't that kind of the whole point?

How can a neurodiversity paradigm represent the people whose data it appropriates: colonizes?

TFA goes with "Global North—mainly the United Kingdom and the United States", so they're just putting the US and UK front and center without excluding the other countries of the usual split [0]. In particular they don't care to do the same spotlighting for the Global South, which makes us fallback to the traditional split to decide which countries fall where.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South

Just found this and thought it very applicable.

It's a global heatmap style chart of autism research.

Http://prevalence.spectrumnews.org/

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