What is Your Name? Neurodivergent people exploring Hugh Blair’s case.
- lauraseymour7
- Jul 14
- 2 min read
Hugh Blair was a Scottish laird thought to have been autistic, deaf, and to have had a learning disability. In 1747-8 Hugh was involved in a court case. In November 2025 a group of neurodivergent people read some dialogue from the case, exploring it like a play. We wanted to find a neurodivergent perspective on the past.
We had:
Images of people from Scotland at the time of different ages, genders, and race/ethnicities
Lawyers’ wigs and fake glasses
A will and coins from Hugh Blair’s time – historical items we could touch
Items to stim with
The lawyer’s questions on cue-cards
All these are in the image below.
Participants could also bring objects that resonated with the case!
I was so grateful to the participants for the care, knowledge, expertise, and time they generously gave to this 2-hour workshop. The knowledge we gain from neurodivergent experience is vital to academic work. The participants’ experiences of being neurodivergent that they shared have changed how I think about Hugh Blair, and inform how I will run workshops in the future.
A few quotations from participants:
‘How excellent it is to be creative with everyone else being neurodivergent’
‘I learnt about Hugh Blair and issues of disability representation/interpretation when it comes to high-support needs/low-support needs individuals’
‘Even if approaching from best intent we may risk normalising at the cost of losing strangeness’.
‘We can go back in our own families for generations and find new ancestors who were likely neurodiv….Drama can do this’
‘How different people’s perspectives can be on one script’
‘I do hope for the script for the play to be expanded with the witnesses, perhaps in future workshops’
I found that people enjoy being creative together, and that neurodivergent people’s viewpoints on the past are not homogenous. I also found that we probably need more than just two hours to work on projects like this. People had lots of ideas and several of them wanted to come back and work on it more, for example in a series of workshops. I agree that it would be nice to spend a longer time in a group and let ideas and discussions develop at a more relaxing pace.
The Swansea workshop received ethical approval from the Swansea University Humanities and Social Sciences ethics committee, approval number 2 2025 14083 14089. This enabled me to collect and anonymise participants’ feedback and publish it in this blog post.
To read a longer writeup of the workshop with more theory behind it, see chapter 4, ‘What is Your Name?’ in Laura Seymour, Early Modern Neurodivergence (Oxford University Press, 2026) – Early Modern Neurodivergence - Laura Seymour - Oxford University Press
To read some of the preliminary work I did on Hugh Blair, in 2021-2024, see Seymour | Copying not Diagnosing: The Case of Hugh Blair of Borgue | Disability Studies Quarterly
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