Stimpunks Foundation

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

Graphic titled 'The Neurodiversity Symbol' on a purple cosmic background of stars and nebula. On the left, the rainbow infinity symbol — the neurodiversity symbol — glows in red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. On the right, a black hourglass holds a rainbow infinity loop where the sand would be, its curves filling the upper and lower chambers. Text below reads: 'Neurodiversity is infinite. So is what we build together.' The Autistic Realms Neurodiversity Affirming badge sits in the lower left, the Stimpunks umbrella logo in the lower right.

Neurodiversity Infinity Symbol

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The rainbow infinity symbol carries a specific history. It was first used on Autistic Pride Day on 18 June 2005, created by Aspies For Freedom to represent “diversity with infinite variations and infinite possibilities” (Autistic Pride Day, Wikipedia, 2005). The choice of rainbow was deliberate — borrowing the visual language of LGBTQIA+ pride to insist that neurodivergent lives are not deficits to be corrected but identities to be celebrated. The gold variant followed, developed by Autistic UK, drawing on Au — the chemical symbol for gold — as a community-led alternative to the pathologising blue of “Light It Up Blue” campaigns (Johnson, 2021).

Neurodiversity, Knowledge, and Collective Action

Underpinning both symbols is a foundational idea. Neurodiversity, as Nick Walker (2021) defines it, is a biological fact: the infinite variation in neurocognitive functioning that has always existed within our species. It is not a metaphor, a movement, or a framework — those are distinct things. 

The horizontal infinity symbol, when flipped vertically, becomes an hourglass — and suddenly it speaks differently. The Stimpunks Foundation, drawing on historian Nico Slate’s (2022) study of the Highlander Folk School, names exactly this shape: wide at the top, where many sources and many kinds of minds converge; narrowing at the waist — the irreducible point of one person’s action; then opening again at the base into collective change. Slate’s recovery of the Highlander method matters here: the answers do not always come from the people alone. When they don’t, you find resources. Knowledge flows from the wide to the narrow, and then outward again.

For Autistic and neurodivergent communities, this is not abstract. Monotropic minds, late-identified adults, multiply neurodivergent people: all move through a world shaped for a narrower neurotype, all bring different streams of attention and perception. The sideways infinity says: your variation is the source — that is the wide top of the glass. Your action, your community, your disclosure, where it widens at the base: that is the world we are building together.

The symbol in its original orientation represents belonging and infinite possibility. Turned, it becomes a pedagogy.

Autistic Realms, Stimpunks Foundation

Hourglass Inspiration

Rather than drawing sharp boundaries between progressive and “traditional” approaches, I suggest a new hybrid model for the pedagogies of resistance within many civil rights organizations, a model that can be visualized as an hourglass. Like the top of an hourglass, the learning process began with a wide range of sources—the ideas and experiences students brought with them, as well as ideas, strategies, and traditions of resistance passed down by more experienced activists and other kinds of “experts.” The goal of the learning process was to empower the individual learner to make sense of these various sources of knowledge in a way that focused—like the center of an hourglass—on a single point: how that individual could contribute to the struggle for racial justice. Such a focus on individual action should not obscure the importance of collective struggle. Indeed, the ultimate goal was to empower each student to contribute to the larger movement and thus, as an hourglass broadens at its base, to create widespread social change. As Daniel Perlstein wrote, “The movement and its schools serve as a reminder that no curricular project can fundamentally transform knowledge and its distribution if it is not part of a process of transforming social relations as well.” Put differently, the answers did not always come from the people but, if they were to be successful, they had to empower the people. Whatever knowledge was generated at Highlander or in a citizenship school mattered to the degree that it was transferred into a protest march, a voter registration drive, or a crowded bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

“The Answers Come from The People”: The Highlander Folk School and the Pedagogies of the Civil Rights Movement | History of Education Quarterly | Cambridge Core

Graphic titled 'The Neurodiversity Symbol' on a purple cosmic background of stars and nebula. On the left, the rainbow infinity symbol — the neurodiversity symbol — glows in red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. On the right, a black hourglass holds a rainbow infinity loop where the sand would be, its curves filling the upper and lower chambers. Text below reads: 'Neurodiversity is infinite. So is what we build together.' The Autistic Realms Neurodiversity Affirming badge sits in the lower left, the Stimpunks umbrella logo in the lower right.

Neurodiversity is infinite and timeless.
So is what we build together.

Autistic Realms & Stimpunks

References

Contributors

  • Helen Edgar
  • Ryan Boren

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