ABSTRACT
This chapter examines diagnosis in three forms that occur roughly as temporal phases in everyday life: as a scientific construct; a social practice; and a political product. It explores more explicitly to the political and personal ramifications of stigmatised disability diagnoses by mining the writings of scholars who participated in a 2014 ‘Diagnosis Interrupted’ conference at George Washington University, USA. The history of the scientific development of the learning disability diagnosis illustrates how a series of concepts and formulations used in different research programmes can be gathered and packaged together into a consensus-based disorder construct under the sway of social pressure. The chapter investigates how a diagnostic construct built by scientific researchers is translated into a useable diagnostic procedure leading to differential professional decisions. The possibility of overturning the hegemony of normal in order to perhaps compose a non-normative self was the theme of the 2014 ‘Diagnosis Interrupted’ conference at George Washington University.
