ADHD through sourdough: a creative-relational inquiry that refuses

Abstract

On the countertop of a kitchen in Scotland, sourdough ferments: slowly, collaboratively, and beyond the illusion of total human control. This thesis, typed with sticky dough fingers a few metres away, emerges too as a refusal of the norms of productivity, linearity, and humanist authority that traditionally govern the kitchen, the academy, and the psychiatrist’s office. Barad’s (2007) agential realism offers a framework for writing and baking through the entanglement of material-discursive practices and the entities those practices produce. These onto-epistemological challenges to essentialism offer a way into the medical and academic practices and relations that come to matter in this inquiry. This includes the production of ADHD as a deficit, which is simultaneously accounted for and rejected in this work. Writing and baking with disability studies, among other scholarship that challenges oppressive norms, ADHD becomes not a problem to overcome but a force that enables this inquiry to take – and resist – shape. ADHD is embraced for its chaotic capacities to generate different possibilities for being, knowing, and relating, exceeding the strictures of traditional methodology in the creative-relational emergence of unpredictable, unwieldly, and disruptive knowledge. Rather than delivering a polished output of my doctoral study, I invite you into the intra-active (Barad 2007) process of this thesis.