A new paper formally names a sub-field that has been operating for thirty years
A paper by Filipe and Holroyd, published in Health in 2026 as part of the journal’s 30th anniversary special issue, maps three decades of social-scientific scholarship on ADHD and proposes the formal definition of a new interdisciplinary sub-field: “the social studies of ADHD.” The paper synthesises work across sociology, history, anthropology, medical ethics and humanities, disability studies, psychosocial studies, media studies, and science and technology studies. It traces the field through four major analytical frames: medicalisation theory anchored in Conrad’s 1975 work on hyperkinesis; the globalisation and pharmaceuticalisation of ADHD diagnosis across cross-national contexts; alternative paradigms including the neurodiversity framework and decolonial perspectives; and the recent reconfiguration of ADHD knowledge through digital platforms and social media.
The paper is careful, comprehensive, and methodologically responsible. The authors propose three future research directions for the sub-field they are naming: digital and more-than-human perspectives on attention and care; ethnography and phenomenology of ADHD affect and embodiment; and intersectional, decolonial, and community-led research approaches. The paper has clear editorial intent — to consolidate a heterogeneous body of work into a recognisable disciplinary formation, to give that formation a name, and to direct future research toward gaps the authors have identified.
As a synthesis of academic scholarship, this is genuinely useful work. The Directory’s editorial position has been operating within something resembling the sub-field Filipe and Holroyd are naming for the duration of its existence, though without the benefit of that name. The frameworks developed — coherence-first, environmental mismatch, accommodation-as-alibi, masking-as-interface-labour, cybernetic attention, industrial-era selection pressure — sit broadly within the territory the paper is mapping. The decolonial perspectives the authors highlight, the digital-age dynamics they trace, the limitations of pure medicalisation theory they name: The Neurodiversity Directory has been engaging with adjacent versions of these arguments across its corpus since its founding in January 2025.
So this article is not a critique of the Filipe and Holroyd paper in the usual sense. The work they have done is the work the field needed someone to do. The mapping is careful, the citations are responsible, the gaps they identify are real gaps. What this piece is instead is an attempt to think — using the paper as occasion — about what the act of naming a sub-field accomplishes, what it cannot quite see about itself, and where the substantive progress in ADHD scholarship is actually happening. The distinction matters because the field-formation move and the actual-progress move are not the same thing, and the temptation to confuse them is structural to how academic disciplines reproduce themselves.
What the field-formation move accomplishes, and what it cannot quite see about itself
Naming a sub-field does several things at once. It consolidates a topic, makes citation networks legible, gives doctoral students a literature to enter, gives funders a category to fund, gives reviewers a frame to assess submissions against, and signals to adjacent disciplines that there is now a recognisable body of work in this space. These functions are real and the consolidation work is not trivial. Filipe and Holroyd have done it carefully and with explicit attention to its boundaries. Their proposed sub-field has clear borders — interdisciplinary, qualitative-methods-friendly, broadly critical of biomedical-only framings, attentive to lived experience and structural design.
What field formation cannot quite see about itself is the question of what work the naming is doing for the namers. This is not a charge of bad faith. It is a structural observation about how academic fields reproduce themselves. A sub-field, once named, generates its own internal economy: its citation patterns, its conference panels, its theoretical orthodoxies, its boundary disputes with neighbouring sub-fields, its career incentives. The act of formalising “the social studies of ADHD” produces, immediately, a category of work that counts as “within the field” and an implicit category of work that does not. The work that does not count tends to be the work happening outside academic publishing — and in the case of ADHD scholarship, an enormous proportion of the actual cultural and political work reframing ADHD is now happening outside the academy. None of it appears in the paper’s map.
This is the point at which it becomes useful to introduce a distinction. The frame is not original to this piece, though its application here is. The distinction is between progressiveness — self-identification with the idea of progress, the token-level performance of advancing things — and actual progress, which is the measurable structural work that changes what is the case. Most academic field-formation is progressiveness. It performs the recognition of a domain of inquiry that has matured to the point of needing a name. It does not, generally, change what is the case in the world the sub-field is supposed to be studying. The naming serves the field. Whether it serves the population the field is about is a separate question, and one the act of naming structurally cannot ask of itself.
Filipe and Holroyd’s paper exemplifies this dynamic neatly. The substantive intellectual content of the paper — the recognition that ADHD spans neurobiology and social environment without those being mutually exclusive, the synthesis of decolonial perspectives, the engagement with platformed diagnosis dynamics — is good and useful. The field-formation move that brackets that content is doing different work. It is consolidating a category. The risk is not that the consolidation is wrong. The risk is that it gets confused with the work it is consolidating, and that the field then proceeds as though naming itself constitutes progress on the questions it claims to be addressing.
The question worth asking of any field-formation move, including this one, is the serving question. Who is being served by the naming? The authors, the disciplines they sit in, the doctoral students who will now have a clearer literature to enter, the funders who can recognise the field as fundable: these are obvious beneficiaries. Whether the neurodivergent population the field is about is being served by the naming is harder to assess. The paper does not ask this question. The frame the paper operates in does not have a register for asking it.
The decolonial section is right and does not go far enough — what the deeper move looks like
One of the strongest sections of the Filipe and Holroyd paper is its engagement with decolonial perspectives. The authors cite Manase’s work on Africanising neurodiversity through African humanism, the Māori “Aroreretini” reframing of attention as “going to many things” rather than as deficit-disorder, Bianchi and colleagues’ work from Argentina and Brazil pushing against dominant Anglophone framings, and Rojas-Navarro’s Chilean ethnographic work on the temporal dimensions of ADHD diagnosis. The authors call for further intersectional, decolonial, and community-led research as one of their three future directions. The call is correct and the citations are responsible.
The limit of the decolonial section is that it remains within the register of the academic move. “Decolonial” in this frame means resituating diagnostic terminology within non-Western epistemologies, integrating Indigenous ways of knowing (“Two-Eyed Seeing”; or Etuaptmumk) into research methodologies, foregrounding marginalised voices in the production of knowledge. These are useful moves. They are also, in the current academic landscape, increasingly the expected moves — the recognisable performance of decolonial scholarship rather than its substantive content. The paper does not name this tension because the tension is structurally invisible from inside the move it is making.
The deeper decolonial move is not a methodological one. It is the question of what cognitive selection pressures the colonial-industrial project itself encoded into the category of “neurotypicality,” and what it would mean to take seriously the possibility that the dominant cognitive profile in industrial-era Western societies is itself an artefact of a specific historical-political-economic regime rather than a stable human baseline. The workplace piece earlier in this cluster argued exactly this: that “neurotypicality” is what survived industrial-era selection pressure across roughly 150 years of factory time, clock discipline, hierarchical role compliance, and routinised attention demands. The decolonial argument that follows from this is not just that non-Western frames offer alternative vocabularies for cognitive difference. It is that the dominant Western diagnostic category — neurotypicality itself — is a colonial-industrial artefact, and the cognitive profiles it pathologises as “neurodivergent” may be closer to what human cognition looks like outside the specific selection regime that produced the industrial subject.
This move is harder to make in academic publication because it threatens the categorical infrastructure the discipline depends on. If neurotypicality is itself a colonial-industrial artefact, then the entire research apparatus that treats it as a baseline and neurodivergence as deviation from that baseline is operating on a category error. Most fields cannot make this move because making it would dissolve the field. The Directory can make it because the Directory is not a field. The Directory is a platform with an inherent publishing operation which works in service of a population whose cognitive lives are being shaped by the structures the move would unmask.
What this means in practice is that there is a kind of decolonial work the academic frame can do — careful, responsible, citation-aware, methodologically rigorous — and there is a kind of decolonial work it structurally cannot. The work it cannot do is the work that would put the field’s own conceptual foundations at stake. That work is happening, but it is mostly happening outside academic journals, in the corpus of works that are being built by neurodivergent founders and writers, with editorial operations like this one, who do not have the same incentive structure to preserve the categories the academic frame depends on.
Where the substantive convergence is happening, and what would actually constitute progress
The most interesting development in ADHD scholarship in 2026 is not the formal naming of a sub-field. It is the convergence — still largely unrecognised by both sides — between the social-scientific literature Filipe and Holroyd map and the neurobiological literature on digital environments and cognitive impairment. The Alsuwaylim systematic review published in April 2026, covered in the previous editorial, documented the full neural signature of ADHD emerging in non-diagnosed adult populations from sustained digital multitasking exposure. The same fronto-parietal inefficiency, hippocampal encoding disruption, working memory degradation, elevated DMN activity, and metacognitive failure that historically defined ADHD when present from childhood are now appearing reliably in the general adult population as a function of environmental exposure.
The Filipe and Holroyd paper documents, from the social side, the same phenomenon: platformed diagnosis, lay medicalisation, the “platform habitus” that replicates and exacerbates ADHD-like symptoms, the algorithmic and memetic amplification of ADHD content, the commodification of attention by digital platforms. The social-scientific frame names what is happening culturally. The neurobiological frame names what is happening at the substrate level. They are describing the same phenomenon from different angles, and neither field has yet recognised that the convergence is the most important development in ADHD scholarship since the 1990s neurobiological turn.
This convergence is where the substantive progress is happening, and it is happening largely outside any single field’s recognition. The progress is the recognition that environmental design is now producing, at population scale, the neural and cognitive signature that the diagnostic system labels neurodivergent when it appears in individuals from birth. The progress is the recognition that the boundary between “neurotypical” and “neurodivergent” is being eroded by environmental design — and that this erosion has implications for clinical practice, workplace design, educational pedagogy, public health framing, and the political economy of attention that no current field is positioned to address coherently.
What would actually constitute progress, in the serving register, is work that meets the population where the population is now living. Not in the academic journals, not in the consolidated sub-fields, not in the careful methodological frameworks that count as the discipline. The population is living in workplaces that are eroding the cognitive substrate the workplaces were designed around, in digital environments that are producing the cognitive profile they then pathologise, in clinical systems operating with diagnostic categories that no longer cleanly track the underlying reality. The work that serves that population is work that names this clearly and offers frameworks for navigating it. That work is happening — in the waning attention work, the screen exposure and virtual autism work, the technostress piece, the accommodation-as-alibi frame, the neurodiversity guides and statistics coverage etc — and it is not principally happening in the sub-field Filipe and Holroyd have just named. The naming is good. The work is elsewhere.
The Directory’s editorial position is that the naming of “the social studies of ADHD” is a useful consolidation move within the academy, that the work the paper synthesises is genuinely valuable, that the future directions the authors propose are sound within the frame they operate in, and that the substantive progress in understanding what is happening to human attention at population scale is happening in the convergence between the literatures the paper maps and the neurobiological literatures it cannot quite include. The work that follows from taking that convergence seriously is not academic field-formation. It is the work of building publishing infrastructure, editorial corpora, and practitioner-facing frameworks that can carry the substantive argument forward into the public domain where the political and structural decisions about attention are actually being made. That work is the corpus this editorial sits within. The Filipe and Holroyd paper is a useful waypoint. It is nowhere near being the destination.
Citations
Ronnie Cane (2025) — Progressiveness: the opposite of progress (ronniecane.com)
Filipe, A. M., & Holroyd, D. (2026) — Mapping the social studies of ADHD: From medicalization theory to neurodiversity in the digital age, and future directions
Alsuwaylim, A. M., Alshehri, O. A., Alzahrani, S. Y., Alsubaie, F. B. S. M., Ali, M. O., & Yacoub, S. A. (2026) — The effects of digital multi-tasking and task switching on working memory: A systematic review
