The chronology that follows is selective rather than comprehensive. It traces the works that the citation graph and the autistic-led commentary tradition together identify as load-bearing for the field as it now stands, with attention to the suppressed lines that the bibliographic graph would otherwise occlude.
| Year | Work | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1988 | Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light | Established the rest-as-warfare tradition that Hersey later inherits and develops. Read as the foundational text in the lineage that runs through Black liberation theology into liberation pedagogy. |
| 1992-1999 | Sinclair, Don't Mourn for Us; ANI organising; Mel Baggs essays | Pre-academic autistic self-organising. The intellectual labour later attributed to Singer alone happens largely in this period and inside community spaces that the academic citation graph captures poorly. |
| 1998 | Judy Singer, master's thesis, University of Technology Sydney | Introduces neurodiversity as a sociological term. The 2024 origins-correction by Botha-Chapman-Onaiwu-Kapp-Stannard-Ashley-Walker returns proper credit to the autistic-of-color, intellectually disabled, and AAC-user organisers whose work pre-dated Singer. |
| 1999 | Tema Okun, White Supremacy Culture | Names the organisational habits (perfectionism, urgency, defensiveness, worship of the written word, quantity over quality) that the curriculum borrows as facilitator self-audit. Revised continuously since. |
| 2002 | Simon Baron-Cohen, extreme male brain hypothesis | The dominant theoretical statement in clinical autism research for nearly a decade. The hypothesis carried the field's prior commitments forward and became the principal target the post-2012 paradigm shift had to displace. |
| 2005 | Murray, Lesser, & Lawson, monotropism in Autism | The cognitive-primitive account that the post-2018 wave will rehabilitate. Cited 433 times by 2025; under-cited relative to its theoretical importance. |
| 2012 | Damian Milton, double empathy problem, Disability & Society | The conceptual hinge. Reframes social-communication breakdown as bilateral rather than unilateral. Cited 1,702 times. |
| 2013 | Kapp et al., Deficit, difference, or both?, Developmental Psychology | The first quantitative survey of autistic-community attitudes toward the neurodiversity framing. Cited 1,088 times. |
| 2013 | Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip | The disability-studies-and-queer-theory text the autism critical literature inherits. |
| 2014 | Mel Baggs's continuing essays (1990s through death in 2020) | The most important AAC-user theorist of the period. Largely absent from the academic citation graph; recovered partially by Yergeau and the post-2024 origins correction. |
| 2015 | McWade, Milton, & Beresford, mad-studies and neurodiversity dialogue | The single best published attempt to put mad studies and neurodiversity in conversation. Worth recovering. |
| 2016 | Kenny et al., language-preferences survey | Documents Anglophone autistic preference for identity-first language. Cited 1,818 times. Methodological caveats about generalisation across cultures and across the life course apply. |
| 2017 | Hull et al., Putting on My Best Normal, JADD | The qualitative anchor for the masking literature. Cited 1,148 times. |
| 2017 | Melanie Yergeau, Authoring Autism | Opens the rhetorical and queer-theoretical front. Re-frames autistic communicative agency against the deficit literature. |
| 2018 | Hull et al., CAT-Q development and validation, JADD | The masking-questionnaire instrument the field has since used. Cited 449 times. |
| 2018/2021 | Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology (1st and 2nd eds.) | Establishes radical self-love as embodied disability-justice practice. Becomes a primary reading for the curriculum's somatic and dignity work. |
| 2019 | Autism in Adulthood founded under Christina Nicolaidis | The affirming-paradigm flagship journal. Reorients the publication economy of autistic-adult research toward community-based participatory work. |
| 2019 | AASPIRE practice-based guidelines (Nicolaidis, Raymaker, Kapp, et al.) | The methodological standard for inclusion of autistic adults in research. The curriculum's intake and consent architecture inherits this. |
| 2020 | Raymaker et al., autistic-burnout definition, Autism in Adulthood | Operationalises a phenomenological category that clinical literature had not previously named. Cited 280-plus times by 2025. |
| 2020 | Crompton et al., diffusion-chain trilogy | The empirical confirmation of Milton's bilateral-failure prediction. Cited 447-plus times. |
| 2020 | Kapp (Ed.), Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement (open access) | The community-history volume. Documents the organising tradition that the academic citation graph poorly represents. |
| 2021 | Pellicano & den Houting, paradigm-shift annual review, JCPP | The formal theoretical statement of the paradigm shift. Cited 593 times. |
| 2021 | Bottema-Beutel et al., avoiding ableist language, Autism in Adulthood | Becomes the most-cited methodological-discipline piece in the field. Cited 1,100 times. |
| 2021 | Nick Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies | The neuroqueer theoretical-poetic statement. Low formal citations; high practitioner penetration. |
| 2021 | Devon Price, Laziness Does Not Exist | Translates labour-extraction critique into a self-help register that reaches a mass audience. |
| 2022 | Robert Chapman, Empire of Normality | The Marxist-disability-studies theoretical statement. Locates neuronormativity inside industrial capitalism's evaluative regime. |
| 2022 | Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance | The mass-audience publication of the Nap Ministry's liberation theology of rest. Grounded in womanist tradition and Black liberation theology. |
| 2022 | Devon Price, Unmasking Autism | The trade-press anchor that brings liberation-pedagogy framing into autistic-adult reading. Establishes the late-diagnosed phenomenology as a public discourse. |
| 2022 | Botha, Autism research is in crisis, Frontiers | The methodological-and-political indictment of the field's prior researcher-on-autism arrangement. |
| 2022 | Moncrieff et al., serotonin umbrella review | The mad-studies-aligned challenge to the serotonin hypothesis of depression. Cited 857 times. Bears on the broader anti-pathology lineage rather than autism specifically. |
| 2023 | Higgins et al., burnout systematic review | The first systematic review of autistic-burnout literature. Confirms that the construct has reached publication critical mass. |
| 2023 | Dallman et al., affirming-components framework | Operationalises affirming therapy into nameable practice components. |
| 2023 | Sandbank et al., Mol Psych umbrella | Documents effect-size inflation in behavioural-paradigm intervention literature. The methodological audit the field had been postponing. |
| 2023 | Linden et al., network meta-analysis of CBT for autistic anxiety | Modest CBT benefit; no ND-affirming arm in any included trial. The empirical floor under affirming therapy claims is not yet RCT-level. |
| 2024 | Botha-Chapman-Onaiwu-Kapp-Stannard-Ashley-Walker, origins correction | Returns proper credit to the autistic-of-color, intellectually-disabled, and AAC-user organisers the field had been attributing to Singer alone. The most important methodological-and-historical correction of the period. |
| 2024 | Dwyer et al., trans-diagnostic monotropism | The empirical license for pan-ND design choices. Monotropism extends beyond autism into the broader umbrella. |
| 2025 | Flower et al., affirming-therapy Delphi study | The most recent operationalisation of affirming therapy into therapist-facing guidance. |
| 2025 | Higgins burnout review (first systematic review) | Burnout becomes a clinical-research category with a formal evidence base. |
Three influence lines run through the field with enough citational density to organise the genealogy:
Uta Frith trained Simon Baron-Cohen, who trained the Autism Research Centre cohort whose work has produced the Cambridge programme's quantitative output for two decades. The line carries the cognitive-deficit programme's principal explanatory framework and remains the most heavily cited cluster in the field by raw count. The Cambridge cohort has been slower to absorb the post-Milton paradigm shift than the Edinburgh, Portland, and Stirling clusters.
Laurent Mottron at Montreal trained Michelle Dawson, an autistic researcher whose work on autistic intelligence and the enhanced-perceptual-functioning hypothesis re-grounded several key claims of the field in autistic-led research. The Mottron cluster has produced both the most autism-researcher-positive output of any major francophone-anglophone cluster and one of the field's most contested figures, given Mottron's prototypical autism arguments that the affirming paradigm has been arguing with for the last several years.
Christina Nicolaidis at Portland State and OHSU, with Dora Raymaker as a long-term autistic co-investigator, built the AASPIRE methodology that has trained a generation of community-based-participatory researchers. The network's output anchors the affirming-paradigm methodological standard. Pellicano, Fletcher-Watson, Kapp, Crompton, Botha, den Houting, and the broader Edinburgh-Portland-Stirling-London cluster all draw from or contribute to this methodological lineage.
Four paradigm shifts have happened in the field since 1998. Each shift has cost the field something, and naming the costs is part of taking the shifts seriously.
Accelerated by Milton 2012 and consolidated in the 2018-2022 wave (Pellicano-den Houting 2021, Bottema-Beutel 2021, Walker 2021, Chapman 2022). The shift cost the field a clear consensus about what counts as autistic suffering that the clinic should treat. The cost is not nominal: a clinician with a patient in front of them needs to know what the goal of the encounter is, and the affirming paradigm has been working out the answer in real time.
Accelerated by Crompton 2020's empirical confirmation of Milton 2012's prediction. The shift cost the cognitive-science programme its dominant explanatory framework. A unified replacement has not yet appeared. Predictive processing, monotropism, and the broader interactionist programme are candidate replacements; the field has not yet coalesced.
Accelerated by Chapman 2021 and 2023. The shift cost the field its claim to political neutrality. Once neuronormativity is described as a regulatory ideal produced by industrial capitalism, the field has made a political argument that no quantitative outcome study can resolve. The cost is permanent.
Accelerated by AASPIRE 2019 and Botha 2022. The shift has cost the field the methodological convenience of treating autistic adults as objects of research, and has begun to surface the citation-cartel and hyper-credentialing dynamics that excluded autistic-of-color, intellectually-disabled, and non-Anglophone scholars from the prior canon. The shift is not yet complete; the 2024 origins correction is one piece of evidence that the field's reckoning is still in progress.
The genealogy as the citation graph reads it occludes several traditions that any responsible review needs to surface:
The 2024 origins correction is the inflection point a careful reader should hold onto. The correction does not simply restore historical credit. It changes what the field can claim about its own founding, and it puts pressure on the citation economy that produced the prior arrangement. The next decade of the field's work will be conducted in the wake of that correction. The curriculum sits in that wake and tries to honor it. The honoring shows up in the reading list, in the visible-absence accounting, and in the facilitator self-audit instrument. Whether the honoring is adequate is a question the curriculum's first cohort will help to answer.