Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes auditory processing disorder (ADP) within ADHD as a socially, politically, and medically constructed category, highlighting the intersection of audism and ableism and their influence on the biomedical categories, understandings of sensory difference and personhood.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines auditory processing disorder (APD) as a part of ADHD as a socially, politically, and medically constructed category through which ideas of normality, attention, deservingness, and responsibility are produced and contested. APD occupies an unstable position across biomedical, educational, and institutional domains, where it is often framed as either sensory deficit, cognitive dysfunction, moral failure, or personal responsibility. Rather than treating APD as a discrete diagnosis, I approach it as a constructed and contested category at which medical authority and normative expectations of communication, personhood and and productivity converge.

Ethnographic attention to sites like classrooms, online spaces or workplaces shows how auditory difference is continually reclassified through encounters among audiometric data, moral judgments about attention, and institutional norms of efficiency. Difficulties with listening or filtering sound may become evidence of hearing loss, inattentiveness, deviance, or lack of discipline, depending on which categories are available and credible. Following Friedner and Block’s (2017) call to analyze deafness and neurodivergence side by side, this paper focuses on how and where discriminatory structures such as audism and ableism intersect, co-produce hierarchies of legitimacy, and reinforce narrow understandings of communication.

By tracing how APD is made and unmade across these contexts, this paper examines the possibility of destabilizing diagnostic boundaries in order to imagine more expansive forms of access, care, and belonging, and to open space for sensory solidarities (Friedner, Block 2017) that challenge entrenched moral economies of ability.