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Paper short abstract

This paper explores an ethnographic tussle between new biopolitical categories of “Troubles trauma” and neurodivergence, within neighbourhoods of Belfast particularly touched by the conflict. At the swirling threshold between these stories, people made sense of their bodyminds and histories anew.

Paper long abstract

In the long aftermath of mass violence in the North of Ireland/Northern Ireland, meanings of disability and chronicity are splintering. Reparation bureaucracies for harms done during the conflict have substituted categorisations of victimhood with disability, creating new forms of disabled subject and discourses of “Troubles trauma”. Yet among fellow neurodivergent and disabled people in the working-class neighbourhoods of west Belfast where infrastructural legacies of sectarianism and the violence continue to shape daily life, these divisions between (for instance) autism and trauma are a site of debate, doubt, wonder, and a search for truth. Where reparation, housing or disability benefit bureaucracies aim to elucidate stable biopolitical categories that would define a sufferer of Troubles PTSD (supposedly curable, ambiguously chronic) against an autistic person (disabled for life), neurodivergent people in west Belfast mischievously translated their own interpretations of trauma and autism, creating new swirling thresholds at which the meanings of both were transforming alongside changing stories about what happened during the conflict. In a tussle with colliding narratives through which to make sense of their bodyminds, histories and livelihoods, they gathered in kitchens, cross-community groups, autism support meetings, housing campaigns and urban gardens to ask together: “How do you know what’s autism and what’s trauma?”. The point of the question was to wonder. Disability in the long aftermath of the conflict, then, tarries in the dichotomy between an expression or critique of mass injustice written on bodyminds, and a lively, visceral truth of embodied difference that overspills moral and political meanings.