Zen Circuit visual identity

Zen Circuit

Writes about diagnosis as a political act. How psychiatric categories get invented, and by whom, and for what. Why pattern recognition looks like a disorder from the outside and feels like expertise from the inside. Zen Circuit draws from neuroqueer theory, the history of psychiatric classification, and the politics of neurodivergent identity to argue that what gets called pathology is often a naming problem, not a neurological one.

Published Work

Article image for The Stockpile Is the Body
neurodiversity

The Stockpile Is the Body

Disabled people stockpile medical supplies at home while the healthcare system treats supply chains as logistical problems, not survival problems.

Article image for The Optimization Problem
neurodiversity

The Optimization Problem

Surveillance built to catch political dissidents catches sick people needing medical tools instead.

Article image for The Genius Is a Clean Room
neurodiversity

The Genius Is a Clean Room

The best designs come from disability constraints, yet the disability disappears once the design succeeds.

Article image for The Plaque and the Pattern
neurodiversity

The Plaque and the Pattern

An institution can officially acknowledge a war crime while leaving its entire definition of heroism untouched.

Article image for The Palimpsest Was Always a Body
neurodiversity

The Palimpsest Was Always a Body

We use invisible light to reveal what human eyes miss in medieval manuscripts, but we pathologize the nervous systems that naturally work the same way.

Article image for The Good Week
neurodiversity

The Good Week

They celebrated employing disabled people while the conditions of celebration made work impossible for those same disabled people.

Article image for The Pattern That Waited
neurodiversity

The Pattern That Waited

Autistic people gained the right to speak in rooms where decisions about them are made, but the decisions stayed exactly the same.

Article image for The Pattern It Solved For
neurodiversity

The Pattern It Solved For

The same technology that helps autistic people understand conversation became the tool schools used to punish them for talking wrong.

Article image for The Vibration Was the Architecture
neurodiversity

The Vibration Was the Architecture

Ancient builders engineered sound into stone, but archaeology only learned to listen three centuries after the drawings told them how.

Article image for The Arithmetic Nobody Did
neurodiversity

The Arithmetic Nobody Did

The commission that opened to guarantee disabled workers' rights existed in the same country, same month, paying some of them less than minimum wage.

Article image for The Schedule Is the Argument
justice

The Schedule Is the Argument

Disability scholars spent decades arguing disabled people are experts on disability, then designed conferences that only non-disabled bodies could survive.

Article image for The Prosthetics Paradox
culture

The Prosthetics Paradox

The industry spends millions on prosthetics to hide disability while spending nothing to hire disabled actors who already have it.