Counter-Cartographies sets out to offer, as the title suggests, a perspective ‘counter’ to much of the discourse around the term “neurodiversity”. Hilton traces the history of this discourse around neurological differences from the 1950s to present day, through forms of expression such as film, media and performance art. Throughout this retracing, he takes apart much of the common framing of autism and other forms of neurodivergence, as strange, inconvenient, or whimsical deviations from an externally fixed ‘norm’ to which they need to be returned to at any price. Instead, he suggests a non-condition-centred approach to neurodiversity, one that is politically charged, understanding the collective strength of community in which individuals are autonomous, empowered, and thriving in, with, and through their ‘otherness’. This is a pushback also of a capitalistic system that seeks to divide, label, and isolate in order to foster and sustain its supply of profitable post-modern hyper-individualistic consumers.

One figure that does not fit into this system is that of the ‘wild child’, a character that seemingly resists, or is incapable of, adjusting to society’s expectations and (often unwritten) regulations about what is, and is not, proper and ‘befitting’ behaviour. Truffaut’s version of the reappearing story of “L’enfant sauvage” lays out the “domesticating force” and “medico-pedagogical” interventions used to subject the ‘wild child’ and its “body’s nervous sensibilities” to notions of appropriate or ‘normal’ behaviour (p. 41). Because of its apparent lack of human-like speech and failure to conform, the ‘wild’ or ‘turbulent’ child becomes classed as ‘savage’ but would today perhaps find themselves otherwise diagnosed. By way of Joan W. Scott’s definition of the “other” as an “attribution of characteristics that distinguish categories of people from some presumed (and usually unstated) norm” (The Evidence of Experience, 1991), Hilton takes existing critical scholarship of the arbitrary “designation of otherness” and the history of “difference” into the growing discourse in neurodiversity studies. In much of Western society those who fail to assimilate (or sometimes merely thrive) are still otherised, categorised, pathologised, and subjected to the “psychiatric expertise” and “regimes of normalisation” at the hands of “disciplinary institutions”, such as schools, prisons, hospitals, or psychiatric asylums (pp.16-17).

The second chapter further explores these institutions, especially the mental asylum, as forms of “large-scale management of populations deemed incapable - mentally or otherwise - of working to support themselves” (p.70). The asylum becomes a machine for “moral treatment” that intervenes “into the troubled minds of its inmates” in a move analogous to “the role assumed by the invisible hand of the market” to regulate “civil society” under “industrial capitalism” (pp.70-71). Through the work of Frederick Wiseman, whose ethnographic documentaries critically investigate and capture the mundane brutality of prisons/hospitals, revealing how state institutions “process” inmates/patients and staff alike, effectively dehumanising both groups equally. As Hilton further unpacks the “asylum” in its dichotomy as a place of confinement or refuge, we meet the insurgent character of poet and ethnologist Fernand Deligny, who countered the prevailing methods of these institutions, particularly in the treatment of delinquent youths and autistic children. His (supposedly) “radical ideas about pedagogy and cinema”, were explored in various different iterations throughout his career (p. 50). For Deligny un- and remaking the asylum as a place beyond institutional forces, returning the word to its sense as a place of refuge, became part of the main preoccupations in his life and he outright “refused to accept the necessity of institutional confinement” (p.74).

Following Deligny's “wander lines” into the third chapter, we see for instance how “mapping and cartography” can become “counter strategies” in response to the “increasing surveillance and policing of neurodivergence in societies of control” (p. 106). Where ‘difference’ is established, or diagnosed, there are those arms of state that see themselves justified to assert “apparatuses of security, surveillance, and control” to govern over those ‘vulnerable’ groups that include the neurodivergent (p.109). Attempts at escaping the control of this contemporary, liberal governance, such as through autistic tendencies to wander, are seen as dangerous and therefore warrant further surveillance. In the justification of this subjugation, the physical movement of autistic bodies becomes labelled as dangerous, “erratic” and “pathological”, something to be remedied - medicated, retrained, monitored (p. 106). Surveillance used as a tool of institutional power is exacerbated for those that also meet other “categories of social difference” such as race and/or disability (p. 105).

In his fourth chapter, Hilton questions the limitations of thinking about ‘voice’ only in terms of the verbalising of thoughts through words and puts forward arguments and methods towards the depathologisation of ‘non-typical’ communication. The diagnosis of autism, and especially the distinction between ‘low’ and ‘high functioning’, is still made to a large extent contingent on the ability to communicate verbally. The idea of neurodiversity in contrast, is at its core to make “space for the ‘voices’ of autistic people and others stigmatised as neurologically atypical” (p. 136). The “question of voice” is explored here through neurodiverse artists such a as Jonathan Berger (An Introduction to Nameless Love) and Mel Baggs (In My Language) as well as other performances at the intersections of the physical body, and its voice, gesture, sensation, and human identity. Baggs, for instance, asks “what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, language, and communication, and what does not” (p. 137). The chapter demonstrates through these artists work, that ‘nonlanguage communication’, such as continuous tactile and haptic interactions with the environment, is not just everywhere and ongoing, but can be just as valuable, rich, and “expressively communicative as neurotypical spoken language” (p. 152)?

In a political system that seeks to enforce a homogenous and compliant citizenship, even small deviations from the ‘norm’, such as social awkwardness or introversion’, are cause for concern and demand action. ‘Shyness’, like other forms of difference, is met with hostility and medicalised as a symptom of anxiety disorders or autism. A certain taste is conjured by the word, as it appears in terms like “work-shy”, where throughout history it has become weaponised against various groups, such as the unemployed, and/or the mentally or physically disabled. Hilton points to the shy radical movement which seeks to undercut the “extrovert supremacy” inherent in the dominant understanding of sociality as a “compulsory norm” (p. 171). The shy underground project has built a community to reclaim shyness and introversion from the pathologising and even criminalising identity politics of the American security state and rejects the force to “compel neurotypicality” (p. 170).

Taking inspiration from neurodiverse self-advocacy groups and radical collective movements like these, Hilton successfully reframes autism and other forms of neurodiversity beyond the limiting constraints of their own labels. The book’s tagline “how to remake the world with neurodiversity at its heart”, hints at its offer of a radical rethinking of existing structures that seek to “otherwise” and isolate individuals that struggle, or refuse, to conform. Hilton deconstructs the concept of the “neuro-typical” social order, and its inherent violence, by challenging the norms and regulations of our institutions and systems of governance across disciplines, making a strong argument for reevaluating our political infrastructure, policies and systems that serve to normalise and control the ‘deviant’.

This review offers just a glimpse at the many routes Counter-Cartographies takes the reader down, to demonstrate how neurodiversity can be used as an approach to rethink issues of disability, gender, race, and sexuality. It is rich and dense and thought provoking, even for those already involved in the neurodiversity discourse. For those new to the field, this book offers a safe launchpad for radical rethinking of the systems of norms we all live under.