PhD student
College: Corpus Christi
Supervisors: Nick Hopwood and Sarah Marks
Thesis topic: From Disorder to Identity: The Transformation of ADHD in the Age of Neurodiversity
Research interests: history and philosophy of medicine, especially psychiatry and cognitive science; neurodiversity; philosophy of science; disability
Email address: jb2690@cam.ac.uk
Current research
Funded by a scholarship from the Cambridge Trust, my project asks how ADHD was transformed from a medical category into a complex identity in the early twenty-first century. While previous studies have explored the history of ADHD up until the early 2000s, I will explore how various stakeholders, such as the neurodiversity movement and scientific and medical institutions, contributed through the communications media to the making of a new identity. I am interested in the legitimating role of (neuro)scientific discourse within these different on- and offline communities.
In the process I aim to develop a model for studying shifting webs of communication in the age of social media. At the same time, I wish to refine analytical frameworks, notably Ian Hacking’s ‘looping’, that are commonly used to describe and conceptualize interactions between the human sciences and other social worlds.
Education
2023: MSc. History and Philosophy of Science, Utrecht University
2021: BA Philosophy with a minor in Physics, KU Leuven
Teaching
Guest Lecturer for the BA course ‘Empathy for biologists, jurists and psychologists’, Utrecht University, 2024 and 2025
Outputs
Blog post: Lessons from the history of the DSM-III – Shells and Pebbles. 2024
Online Exhibition: Haarlem’s Museum of the Mind. Madness Canada website. Co-authored with Prof. Megan Davies. 2023