ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a detailed interrogation of what it means to engage the biological and the social together and to do this it engages the field of special educational needs and the highly contentious diagnosis of 'attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder' (ADHD). It explores the potential to work across the range of educational, activist and biological knowledges that are sketched before to understand special educational needs as biosocial assemblage. The chapter demonstrates the potential and pitfalls for such an approach, focusing on ADHD, a pronounced and growing diagnosis in education and a site of particular activity in bioscience research. Dillon and Craven argue that understanding the aetiology of ADHD is important as it has potential treatment implications, but at that same time a genetic model has the potential to limit consideration of psychosocial interventions. At various points, the chapter talks about the difference between associations and mechanisms in science and influences, processes and forces in sociology.
