As ‘self-consciously subversive bricolage’ (Stimpunks), it paves the way for collective forms of expression that are modular and lively.

Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture) (p. 91).

In what follows, I explore the authorship of web technologies (in the form of WordPress websites) to create alternative social networks by and for neurodivergent communities. These two domains rely not only on web coding, information architecture skills and knowledge gained in technology fields but also the understanding of cultural and social practices that exist in other disciplines. Two of their co-authors – Jorn Bettin and Ryan Boren– have ‘hacked’ their careers in technology fields so that they can dedicate their lives to social justice. Similarly, autistic researchers from around the world who have been trained in cognitive psychology, education, literature, creative writing, and sociology are supplementing disciplinary training with philosophical inquiry to challenge the implicit and widespread assumption that autism and neurodiversity more generally can only be studied through the methods of cognitive psychology.

Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture) (p. 167).

As examples of modular and animating institutions, I refer to the organizational operating model proposed by Jorn Bettin, from the Autism Collaboration Trust (AutCollab), as part of the NeuroDiventures Project. I argue that the model supports ‘transversal’ relations, which are characterized by the ways that power and roles are disrupted’ (Wolf-Meyer 2020: 64) by neurodivergent member-employees working toward a common goal. In terms of facilitation, I provide examples from Stimpunks, who offer ‘Mutual Aid and Human-Centered Learning for Neurodivergent and Disabled People’, by implementing the operating model provided by AutCollab (2023).

Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture) (p. 169).

Like the methods used by Stimpunks, AutCollab also makes use of montage, visual storytelling, and intertext, often in first-person forms, to provide different ways to interact with the content. AutCollab and Stimpunks demonstrate how sharing knowledge about autism or neurodiversity more generally is made possible by institutional arrangements that facilitate individuals with diverse capacities and interests.

Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture) (p. 169).

Organizations such as Stimpunks and AutCollab facilitate connections, between individuals to counter the isolation and perceived burdensomeness that many autistic people experience through dominant social practices.

Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture) (p. 170).

Drawing on ideas from AutCollab, Stimpunks, the Autistic Task Force and Wolf-Meyer’s writing on modular institutions, I explore how the idea of ‘conviviality’, as autonomy within interaction, can apply to autistic people’s distinctive ways of responding to the world and a cooperation across neurotypes and cultures.

Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture) (p. 18).

While I focus in this chapter on AutCollab, Stimpunks, and the Global Autistic Taskforce, there are many other organizations which connect neurodivergent academics globally and regionally and which are working to produce tools to unravel the assumption that there is a singular pathway to becoming a valuable human subject. Like the organizations introduced below, there is seldom a singular focus on neurodiversity, and participants bring their insights into the need to recognize the intersections of atypical subjectivity with differences in ethnicity, sexuality, and gender identity. Together, these organizations themselves suggest models for how we might create institutions that can support atypical forms of learning, working, and playing.

Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture) (pp. 167-168).

Recognizing the injustice of the enforced ‘neurotypicalization’ of neurodivergent and disabled people, Stimpunks focuses on four pillars to support collective efforts to ‘forge our own community’: mutual aid, ‘designing for the edges’, open research, and a diversity consultancy (Stimpunks homepage: n.d.). While the charity also provides financial aid to members, the majority of content refers to the possibilities of a ‘DIY culture’ drawn from many sources: disability activism, punk, and critical pedagogy. One of the founders, Ryan Boren, is a retired technologist and former senior coder at WordPress.

Many of the charity’s activities focus on the notion of ‘reframing’, and the creation of a shared language to enable both self-care and social change (Boren 2020). The reframing works not only at the level of the Neurodiversity Paradigm but in terms of a broader ‘structural ideology’ (ibid). This ideology is intended to shift thinking beyond the ‘attribution error’ of regarding behaviors as resulting from individual dispositional or mindset factors rather than ‘situational factors’ resulting from the social environment and influenced by ‘policies, norms, systems, and other structural realities’ (Boren 2021). Boren notes that the misleading ‘mindset’ mentality is evident in the demand for mindfulness as a solution for the stress that people experience as a direct result of external factors. Boren advocates a political response through design aimed at the ‘edge’, where:

[O]ur societies, and the boundaries of our compassion are tested at the edges, where the truths told are of bias, inequality, injustice, and thoughtlessness. (Stimpunks ‘Edges’)

Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture) (p. 178).

Stimpunks addresses the idea of how education may provide ‘psychological & sensory safe spaces’ that simultaneously provide opportunities for ‘intermittent collaboration’, rather than enforced large group interactions, and ‘collaborative niche construction’. For Stimpunks, the latter means creating the ‘least restrictive environment’ that enables the recognition of all students’ strengths, while at the same time engineering the environment to support the vulnerabilities of all learners. This acknowledges that individuals vary according to sensory sensitivity and will benefit from the development of three distinctive archetypal learning places to maximize possibilities for all learners (not only the ‘neurodivergent’) within both online and physical environments: these as the campfire, cave, and watering hole.

The cave, in particular, is suited to autistic learners or ‘orchids’, who are most susceptible to outside influences: it represents a quiet space where students can retreat to reflect on what they have experienced and engage in a ‘maker’s schedule’ rather than one that is dominated by the instructor. The campfire signifies a situation in which learners share learning in a small group of peers. The watering hole is a space that allows access to a broader ‘common space’, providing an opportunity for ‘intermittent collaboration’ that has been shown to benefit all learners (Stimpunks ‘Cavendish Spaces’).

Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture) (p. 179).

While I focus on texts written by Bettin and Boren, both the Stimpunks and AutCollab websites feature a wide range of narrators, artists, musicians, and commentators, with external links to blog posts, Tweets, and YouTube channels. The Stimpunks website, in particular, offers multiple points of access to and ways through its content and beyond, with key definitions presented in different media, including an ‘ear read’ and a ‘plain text’ format. AutCollab focuses on linguistic and cultural plurality and has made key content available in seven languages. Each website is organized around modules of overlapping themes, and AutCollab provides the opportunity for feedback and critique. Both organizations provide material free at the point of access.

Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture) (p. 179).

I wish to highlight the contrasting approaches to the development of knowledge and technology to support autistic people: on the one hand the ‘pathogen’ model of autistic populations, on the other the community approach to autistic collaboration advocated by Stimpunks and AutCollab. The Lancet Commission’s approach to technology centers on its potential to capture, and potentially minimize, the costs and risks associated with autism in general. Technology seems to serve the role of controlling autistic bodies so that they may be seen to conform to neurotypical social norms (even while this runs the risk of creating further autistic pathologies, such as screen addiction (322)). The community approach, on the other hand, focuses on knowledge and technologies to facilitate connections and capacities that may support both the pursuit of individual interests and plans and collectively meaningful activities that relate to real-world challenges. In the latter case, risks, costs, and knowledge are shared (albeit differentially) by the participants in a particular project, but they are crucial part of any individual’s enjoyment in participating.

Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture) (p. 180).

Conclusion: autistic connectivity in the Anthropocene

Narratives about a shared autistic sensibility may simultaneously serve as acts of care for those who may struggle more than we do with participation in a normative social world, but with whom we otherwise affirm kinship commonalities, and as an affirmation of political agency in resisting the imposition of dominant external narratives onto our lives. This is evident both in Joanne Limburg’s Letters to My Weird Sisters and in the collective narrative acts of the Autistic Task Force, above; it is also apparent in the Stimpunks and AutCollab websites. In each case, political agency depends on recognition – if only by our peers – of what we bring to a shared world so that we retain confidence in our understanding.

Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture) (p. 189).

As I explored in relation to the work of Stimpunks and AutCollab, new media, in particular, provide public spaces that allow for discussions of the limitations of existing family structures when confronted with disability. Autistic-authored autobiographies can be seen not only as a development out of new online communities developed specifically by and for autistic people, but also in terms of these broader counter-normative social contexts that allow reinterpretation of concepts such as care and interdependence. Kinship imaginaries also support the development of counter-discourses about autism and other ‘severe’ neurological conditions which are not based on a reductive neuro-determinism.

Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture) (p. 194).