Stimpunks Foundation

Mutual Aid and Human-Centered Learning for Neurodivergent and Disabled People

punk rocker with rainbow mohawk reading newspaper in a seedy diner

Articles

🗺️

Home/Articles

▶ Table of Contents

  1. Our Most Popular
  2. Featured Articles
  3. Collections
  4. Required Reading
  5. Pillars
  6. Learning Space
  7. Take the Reframer’s Journey
  8. Anti-Ableist Space for Human-Centered Learning
punk rocker with rainbow mohawk reading newspaper in a seedy diner
The Five Neurodivergent Love Locutions
Autigender and Neuroqueer: Two Words on the Relationship Between Autism and Gender That Fit Me
🔥 Autistic Burnout: The Cost of Masking and Passing
Neurodivergent
Eye Contact and Neurodiversity

Collections

Table of Contents

Required Reading

To understand us, read “Choosing the Margin: Design is Tested at the Edges“.

Choosing the Margin: Design is Tested at the Edges
A person that is exploding with sparks from the inside out holds a cordless drill to their own temple, which is also producing sparks.

Enable Dignity

Real inclusive organizing should at a minimum include: Incorporating disability into your values or action statements; having disabled people on the organizing committee or board; making accessibility a priority from day one; and listening to feedback from disabled people.

Nervous boy. First day of school. Holds on to mom while standing in front of the doors into the school

Education Access

We have turned classrooms into hell for neurodivergence. Students with conflicting sensory needs and accommodations are squished together with no access to cave, campfire, or watering hole zones. This sensory environment feeds the overwhelm-> meltdown -> burnout cycle. Feedback loops cascade.

Wheelchair in a maze

Healthcare Access

They don’t take disability studies classes.
They don’t socialize with us.
They don’t listen to us.
Wanted: hospitals and doctors’ offices that…

Green, yellow, and red interaction badges

Interaction Access

Color Communication Badges (aka Interaction Badges) are an accommodation to support social interaction for people with a variety of disabilities and communication needs.

A brailled keyboard

Communication Access

“Written communication is the great social equalizer.” It allows us to participate and be a part of things bigger than ourselves.

Young Asian Cute girl studying with laptop at home during pandemic stock photo

Technology Access

Our multi-age learning community sets up and runs our organization. We don’t use learning management software. Instead, our learners use the professional tools of a modern, neurodiverse organization, without all the ed-tech surveillance baked in. We use technology to co-create paths to  equity and access with our learners.

Let’s organize our lives around love and care.

A group of disabled queer Black folks talk and laugh at a sleepover, relaxing across two large beds. Everyone is dressed in colorful t-shirts and wearing a variety of sleep scarves, bonnets, and durags. On the left, two friends sit on one bed and paint each other’s nails. On the right, four people lounge on a bed: one person braids another’s hair while the third friend wearing a C-PAP mask laughs, and the fourth person looks up from their book. In the center, a bedside lamp illuminates the room in warm light while pill bottles adorn an end table.

Mission

We exist for the direct support and mutual aid of neurodivergent and disabled people.

We serve our loved people so we can keep on living through the onslaught.

Hands overlapping with a heart painted in the middle

Creed

I center the marginalized and the different. I center edge cases, because edge cases are stress cases and design is tested at the edges. I center neurodivergent and disabled experience in service to all bodyminds.

A disembodied arm with blue skin and a self-care tattoo flashes the sign of the horns

Covenant

We pledge to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, diverse, inclusive, and healthy community.

Two cosmic beings, one bearing a red hue and one bearing a blue hue, share a spark inducing kiss

Philosophy

We steer by these acquired phrases. They are compasses and stars that align us on our mission.

Rainbow woven cloth evoking our diversity and interdependence

Interdependence

It is time to celebrate our interdependence. Interdependence acknowledges that our survival is bound up together, that we are interconnected and what you do impacts others. Interdependence is the only way out of most of the most pressing issues we face today.

The many forms of difference. Adaptive Behavior Assessment (ABAS-3), Adult ADHD Self-report Scale (ASRS-v1.1), and Behavior Rating Inventory Executive Function (BRIEF 2) forms spread across a wooden table

Edges

Our designs, our societies, and the boundaries of our compassion are tested at the edges, where the truths told are of bias, inequality, injustice, and thoughtlessness.

Illustration of a woman speaking into a microphone

Manifesto

This is a manifesto that begins but will never end. This is a translation of my world into yours. This is a protest of the notion that there is any correct way to live. We reject neuronormativity and demand the right to learn and live differently.

Ezra Furman – “Temple Of Broken Dreams”

Love and Care

Let's organize our lives around love and care
Let's write each other letters and call it prayer
Let's congregate in the place that isn't anywhere
At the temple of broken dreams

Ezra Furman – Temple of Broken Dreams Lyrics

Pillars

A young woman looks up toward images flowing from an open book with pages riffling

📓 Learning Space

Stimpunks Learning Space offers community and space for passion-based, human-centered learning with purpose. Our learners collaborate on distributed, multiage, cross-disciplinary teams with a neurodiverse array of creatives doing work that impacts community. Via equity, access, empathy, and inclusivity, we create anti-ableist space for the neurodivergent and disabled people most ill-served by “empty pedagogy, behaviorism, and the rejection of equity“.

A green-skinned humanoid with 10 arms and a tree sprouting out of its open heads holds 10 objects: paintbrush, magnifying glass, book, stopwatch, smoking herbs, broom, smartphone, mortar

🧐 Open Research

Our emancipatory research efforts focus on the sweet spot of digital sociology, neurodiversity studies, disability studies, and syncretism, in the open. We improve the scientific
experience for the disabled and the
neurodivergent by restoring the humanities. We bring voice into empirical constructs and translate voice into academic comprehension.

A group of disabled queer Black folks talk and laugh at a sleepover, relaxing across two large beds. Everyone is dressed in colorful t-shirts and wearing a variety of sleep scarves, bonnets, and durags. On the left, two friends sit on one bed and paint each other’s nails. On the right, four people lounge on a bed: one person braids another’s hair while the third friend wearing a C-PAP mask laughs, and the fourth person looks up from their book. In the center, a bedside lamp illuminates the room in warm light while pill bottles adorn an end table.

⛑️ Mutual Aid

Staying alive is a lot of work for a disabled person in an ableist society. We provide real help against the onslaught through mutual aid. We believe that direct support to individuals is the most effective approach to alleviating the barriers and challenges that prevent neurodivergent and disabled people from thriving.

Stimpunks Creator Badge An umbrella inside a circle surrounded by the text "Stimpunks Creator" with rainbow stripes in between

🧰 Creator Grants

We pay creators to create. We buy space to breathe and make. Creativity is a vital force that drives positive change in society. We provide financial support to creators across various fields, including art, advocacy, research, and beyond.
 We aim to enable creators to fully immerse themselves in their work. We recognize the importance of investing in the creative process and the impact it can have on communities and individuals.

Learning Space

silhouette of white rabbit leaping forward across a star field

Our white rabbit (also known as Space Bunny) symbolises playfulness, curiosity, wonder, hope, and expanding learning potential.

🐇 …when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by…

stream of information

Online: Bringing Safety to the Serendipity

Online, we bring safety to the serendipity with our distributed community and communication stack. Chance favors the connected mind. Our learners connect using 1:1 laptops and indie ed-tech. We give our learners real laptops with real capabilities, and we fill those laptops with assistive tech and tools of the trades.

Two children having an adventure, climbing and stepping in a river exploring a beautiful natural area.

Offline: Fresh Air, Daylight, and Large Muscle Movement

Offline, our learners enjoy fresh air, daylight, large muscle movement, and the freedom to stim and play. Ensure there is quiet space and outdoor space that people can access at any time.

Man sitting in the mouth of a cave with open sky and mountain showing beyond the cave

Cavendish Space: Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes for Dandelions, Tulips, and Orchids

We provide psychologically and sensory safe spaces suited to zone work, intermittent collaboration, and collaborative niche construction

Hands overlapping with a heart painted in the middle

We Believe: Human-Centered, Trauma-Informed, Self-Determined, Equity Literate, Interdisciplinary, Open Technology

Learning is rooted in purpose finding and community relevance.
Social justice is the cornerstone to educational success.
Dehumanizing practices do not belong in schools.
Learners are respectful toward each other’s innate human worth.

Why We Reframe

  1. Authenticity Is Our Purest Freedom
  2. Everything that was normally supposed to be hidden was brought to the front.
  3. Learning Pathways: Take a Walk in Our Shoes
  4. Our Story: Challenging the Norm and Changing the Narrative
  5. Take Them Together: Neurodiversity and Disability Justice
  6. Our Umbrella: It Is Time to Celebrate Our Interdependence!
  7. Reframe Disability and Difference: We’re Going to Rewrite the Narratives
  8. Happy Flappy: Let’s Bolster Against Stress and Pass Bodily Survival Knowledge Down
  9. An Encyclopedia of Disability and Difference

Reframe Aid

  1. ⛑ Mutual Aid: Real Help Against the Onslaught
  2. ☂️ Community Care

Reframe Learning

  1. ♿️📚The Need: Anti-Ableist Space for Human-Centered Learning
  2. ❤️ The Answer: Reframing, Respectful Connection, and the Presumption of Competence
  3. ⚡️🦅🌈 The Feeling: Electric Belonging and Soaring Inclusion
  4. 📚 The Learning: Passion-Based, Human-Centered Learning Compatible With Neurodiversity and the Social Model of Disability
  5. The Gift: Learning Disabilities Reframed

Reframe Research

  1. 🗂 Facts, Fire, and Feels: Research-Storytelling from the Edges
  2. Questions for an Industry: Are You Disregarding Harm and Profiting From Our Misery?
  3. Participatory, Emancipatory, Activist Research
  4. Useful Autism Research: Welcome to This Very Important Update

Reframe Services

  1. 🧰✊ Services: Know Our Rights, These Are Our Rights

Take the Reframer’s Journey

Anti-Ableist Space for Human-Centered Learning

A wheelchair user approaches a bathroom door with a closed sign on it

The Need

Space without Behaviorism, Segregation, or Ableism

Concept of romantic relationships and marriage with handicapped man. Vector illustration of love. Family with disabled man. Human relations vector illustration. Man in wheelchair.

The Answer

Reframing and Respectful Connection

Young person in wheelchair with raised arms and a smile

The Feeling

Electric Belonging and Soaring Inclusion

Happy young man using wheelchair admiring piece of art, flat vector illustration. Arts therapy, healing and mental wellbeing.

The Learning

Passion-Based, Human-Centered Learning Compatible With Neurodiversity and the Social Model of Disability

Beautiful young girl in headphones listening to audio book. Audiobook concept. Woman listening to books, podcast online, enjoying literature, learning. Audio bookworm.

The Gift

We have created a system that has you submit yourself, or your child, to patient hood to access the right to learn differently. The right to learn differently should be a universal human right that’s not mediated by a diagnosis.