Towards Tourettic Futures

Tourette Syndrome (TS) has gained unprecedented visibility across academic and public discourse, yet critical scholarship remains dominated by biomedical and deficit-based frameworks. This project makes a decisive intervention by situating TS within critical disability and neurodiversity scholarship, reframing the tourettic not as pathology but as lived, cultural, and political formation. Using interviews, digital ethnography, and participatory creative methods (zine-making and movement workshops), the project investigates how tourettic experience is shaped through digital technologies, from online diagnosis and platformed visibility to the formation of transnational communities of care. Implementing embodied and creative methods to translate findings across cultural divides and foreground tourettic experiences, this research centres the systemically excluded g lobal majority ethnicity, queer, and trans tourettic communities’ experiences, alongside the insights they offer. Through integrating a mixed methodological approach, the project develops the first sustained, interdisciplinary framework for Tourettic Studies. It delivers new forms of evidence for arts, humanities and health, demonstrating how tourettic ways of moving, sensing, and communicating can generate alternative epistemologies of health and difference. In doing so, the project shifts TS research beyond restrictive diagnostic framings and establishes the tourettic as a vital site of knowledge production, cultural creativity and collective hopeful future for tourettic people.