ADHD Experience and Diagnosis: A Societal Perspective

ADHD for kids

I am very excited about Halbertsam’ s writing, especially their work on “low theory,” (a term taken from Stuart Hall) as a theoretical support for the digital humanities component of my Capstone, a digital story-telling video called “Attention-Inattention” (2). ADHD is proving to be a complex, many-sited formulation and I find the idea of having a component of my research articulated through popular knowledge, very appealing. Halberstam advocates use of “low theory” or popular knowledge to “look for a way out of the usual traps and impasses of binary formulations,” in addition to darting “back and forth between high and low culture, high and low theory, popular culture and esoteric knowledge, in order to push through the divisions between life and art, practice and theory, thinking and doing, and into a more chaotic realm of knowing and unknowing” (2). Halberstam’s claim evidenced themselves through a lot of the readings in GWSS 490 such as those of Ursula Le. Guin, N.K. Jemison’s and Nola Hopkinson to name a few. I also want to understand “failure” through Halberstam’s framework, since people with ADHD understand the meaning of the world only too well. Perhaps my story-telling documentary for kids will not be taken seriously. And yet, Halberstam assures me that “the desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production” and that “detours” are good (6). By trying to be taken seriously, Halberstam claims, we run the risk of following the beaten path, “staying in well-lit territories” and “knowing exactly which way to go before you set out” (6). I welcome the chance to be “frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant” (6).
 
This video digital storytelling video was made in response to a comment made by a pediatrician, "when little kids get a diagnosis of AD(H)D, they don't really know what it is." I hope I have caught some of the salient features of the AD(H)D way of being in this digital story.
 

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