Neurodiversity, the social model, and structural ideology are much about the “foregrounding of complexity as the baseline.”

The forces of reductionism are everywhere. We experience them prominently in mainstream education in the forms of behaviorism and grades and metric fixation and deficit ideology. Neuronormativity is a grounding narrative of exclusion that subjugates and defies natural human diversity. We are reduced to sets of inputs and outputs that are far removed from the beautiful and wondrous complexity of humanity and all life.

Refuse reductionism in any direction.

The Danger of Misunderstanding Neuro-Affirming Practice – The Autistic Advocate

How do we foreground complexity as the baseline without being overwhelmed by that complexity? Here are some ways:

• Flexibility
• Compassion
• Acceptance
• Collaborative Niche Construction
• Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes
• Play

Flexibility is key to managing complexity. Part of flexibility is giving up sameness-based notions of fairness for needs-based fairness.

In addition to flexibility, compassion and acceptance are practical and effective magic. They remedy a lot of problems and contribute to all important psychological safety.

Collaborative niche construction and caves, campfires, and watering holes pair well with flexibility. Caves, campfires, and watering holes are primordial learning spaces that have been with humanity since our beginnings. When they are provided and people can move between them freely, much complexity is naturally accommodated. Combining C+C+W with collaborative niche construction accommodates even more of the natural complexity of our species. Niche construction involves directly modifying the environment in such a way that it enhances someone’s chances for success.

Foreground complexity as the baseline. Affirm complexity. We must. The tools for managing that complexity have been with us all along. We need only reacquaint ourselves with human actuality after so long forgetting what children are like, after forgetting that self-directed play is simple and wonderfully complex.

DEI-AB and progressive ideas are framed as adding red tape, when in fact they often cut through swathes of red tape. They foreground complexity while providing timeless tools for managing that complexity.

Systems built for the most complex communicators are not niche solutions—they are blueprints for broad accessibility, exposing what existing systems routinely ignore (Hamraie 2017). We do not need more after-the-fact accommodations awkwardly bolted on exclusionary systems. What is required is radical redesign: systems that begin at the margins and work inward, rather than centering an imagined “average” user (Costanza-Chock 2020; Srinivasan 2025a). This means building from the outset for people with intersecting sensory, motor, and communication needs, as well as for those excluded by language, geography, or normative assumptions (Peña 2019; Srinivasan 2025a; Bal et al. 2016)

This has not been a call for one-size-fits-all designs but for adaptive systems that are customizable, flexible, and co-created with the very communities they claim to include. Structural redesign is not about eliminating all accommodations, but embedding them so deeply that they become expected rather than exceptional. For the most marginalized, inclusion will not come from incremental adjustments but from radical solutions and systemic overhauls. It requires collective commitment to radical acceptance—to presuming competence, to trusting diverse ways of knowing and being, to valuing both independence and interdependence, and to designing environments that recognize all people as having dignity and deserving to belong. As disability justice movements have long shown, design that starts at the edges moves everyone forward (Berne 2015; Hamraie 2017; Pineda 2020).

Inclusion Must Be Global, Decolonized, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse, and Anti-Normative

By foregrounding complexity, we make room for truth.

In most systems, the work that keeps people alive and communities functioning is deliberately hidden. Pain is privatized. Access needs are treated as inconveniences. Care is pushed behind the scenes, made invisible so the surface can look “normal.”
Stimpunks does the opposite.

We bring the hidden work forward: emotional labor, sensory regulation, boundary-setting, mutual aid, failure, repair, grief, joy, and survival. We don’t pretend these things aren’t happening—we design around the fact that they are.

What society calls “oversharing,” we recognize as truth-telling. What institutions label “unprofessional,” we understand as people refusing to erase themselves. What gets framed as weakness is often the hardest work there is.

Stimpunks is built on the belief that systems don’t fail accidentally—they fail because they hide their costs. We refuse that hiding. We surface the costs, the labor, the limits, and the humanity that dominant systems try to bury.

Most institutions survive by flattening people. Lives are reduced to categories, diagnoses, productivity scores, and compliance checklists. Complexity is treated as noise. Need is framed as exception. Disabled and neurodivergent people are told they have special needs—as if care, access, rest, communication, safety, and dignity were optional upgrades instead of basic requirements.

There is no such thing as “normal” and no such thing as “special needs.”There is just interdependence.
Disability Ain’t for Ya Dozens (or Demons): 10 Ableist Phrases Black Folks Should Retire Immediately | by Talila “TL” Lewis | Medium

Neurodivergent and disabled people do not have special needs. We have human needs—the same ones everyone has, expressed in different ways, at different times, and with different constraints. What changes is not the legitimacy of the need, but whether systems are willing to acknowledge it.

We refuse reductionism in all directions.

We bring forward what is usually hidden: sensory limits, fluctuating capacity, emotional labor, access negotiations, care work, repair after harm, the ongoing process of staying regulatedand alive. We foreground complexity because reality is complex. The labor of care is complex. Trauma is complex. Disability is complex. Community is complex. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make systems work—it just makes them cruel.

naturally occurring + equal value = affirm complexity
Sue Fletcher-Watson: Neurodiversity: Liberation and Inclusion for all Autistics – YouTube

By foregrounding complexity, we make room for truth. We allow people to show up as they are, not as abstractions. We acknowledge that access is contextual, that harm and care can coexist, that progress is uneven, that survival is not a straight line.

What gets hidden in dominant systems is not just pain, but process. The messiness. The negotiation. The constant adjustment required to keep people included and alive.

Stimpunks puts that process front and center.

We don’t optimize people for systems.

We expose systems to people.

We don’t ask people to simplify themselves to fit broken systems. We expose those systems to the full reality of human life.

By making needs visible, we make them solvable. By naming complexity, we stop blaming individuals for system failure. By centering care, we refuse the lie that harm is neutral or inevitable.

If we cannot hold space for our own complexity, if we cannot process even the existence of these intrapersonal dialectics, then we also cannot hold that space for the complexity of others and instead default back to this sort of knee jerk reaction, this binary understanding of right and wrong.
UNHINGED: A Guide to Revolution for Nerds & Skeptics – YouTube

Nothing essential stays backstage here—not the labor, not the needs, and not the complexity that makes us human. If it keeps us alive, it belongs at the front.

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Affirm Complexity

naturally occurring + equal value = affirm complexity

Sue Fletcher-Watson: Neurodiversity: Liberation and Inclusion for all Autistics – YouTube

minority status + strength in diversity = politicise neuronormativity

Sue Fletcher-Watson: Neurodiversity: Liberation and Inclusion for all Autistics – YouTube

Neurodiversity foregrounds complexity as the baseline.

I foreground all of this to underscore that there is a neurological difference, or a spectrum of neurology, that must be attended to. The movement for neurodiversity is not interested in homogenizing experience. We are different and we require different accommodations. On the other hand, my interest is not in the neural per se, which I find quickly loses its usefulness in such discussions, particularly in the ways it can be taken up in the humanities and the social sciences as an explanatory category. The neurological is only one point of departure for the question of autistic perception, and of autism more broadly.

So I would say that the concept of the neuropolitical is not particularly interesting to me. I want to support the movement for neurodiversity because I find it exciting and deeply important in its foregrounding of complexity as the baseline. And I want to think about the ways in which an engagement with neurodiversity affects how we think of the political and how we effect change. The political emphasis here is less on neurology than on the question of how normative modes of being subsumed under the unspoken category of the neurotypical organize experience, and how an engagement with neurodiversity changes the questions we ask and the actions we support.

Histories of Violence: Neurodiversity and the Policing of the Norm – Los Angeles Review of Books

Neuronormativity is a grounding narrative of exclusion.

Neurotypicality is a grounding narrative of exclusion. The neurotypical is the category to which our education systems aspire. It is the category to which our ideas of the nuclear family aspire. And, it is the category on which the concept of the citizen (and by extension participation in the nation-state and the wider global economy) is based.

In the context of education, which is the one I am most knowledgeable about, the mechanisms for upholding the neurotypical standard are everywhere in force. Every classroom that penalizes students for distributed modes of attention organizes learning according to a neurotypical norm. Every classroom that sees the moving body as the distracted body is organized according to a neurotypical norm. Every classroom that teaches predominantly for one mode of perception is organizing its learning according to a norm. Every classroom that knows in advance what knowledge looks and sounds like is working to a norm.

Intelligence, understood as the performance of a certain kind of knowledge acquisition and presentation, is built on the scaffold of neurotypicality as the unspoken norm. To speak of the normative tendencies of education is not new. My concern is with what remains largely unspoken in that conversation. Having “special needs” classrooms upholds neurotypicality, for instance, as the dominant model of existence. Drugging our children because of their attention deficit is upholding a neurotypical norm. Sending our black and indigenous children to juvenile detention centers in disproportionate numbers is upholding a neurotypical norm which takes, as neurotypicality always does, whiteness as the standard.

To engage with neurodiversity is to speak up about the extraordinary silence around neurotypicality and to acknowledge that we do not question ourselves enough as regards what kinds of bodies are welcomed and supported in education, and in social life more broadly. It is still far too rare that we discuss neurotypicality as that which frames our ways of knowing, of presenting ourselves, of being bodies in the world.

Histories of Violence: Neurodiversity and the Policing of the Norm – Los Angeles Review of Books

Each of us is as complex as the universe.

What develops is not just an organism, an individual, a child, but an immensely complex system. Research on interacting brains, bodies, and environments has long concluded that each of us is as complex as the universe, indeed probably more so (Marcus & Freeman, 2015; Swaab, 2014). This is why narrow silos can be dangerous when we deal with learning and development. Wrong ideas here can do real harm.

Gee, James Paul. Teaching, Learning, Literacy in Our High-Risk High-Tech World: A Framework for Becoming Human (pp. 3-4). Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.

Narrow specializations in narrow academic silos have brought us a great deal of progress in science. But times are changing. When we face highly complex problems, narrow expertise can become dangerous. Narrow experts tend to underestimate and undervalue what they don’t know (Harford, 2011; Jenkins, 2006; Weinberger, 2012). They tend to think that their methods answer complex questions that, in reality, go well beyond their area of expertise. And they tend to engage in “groupthink” as they converge in their narrow echo chambers, advancing paradigms that are not tested against the results of other silos.

Gee, James Paul. Teaching, Learning, Literacy in Our High-Risk High-Tech World: A Framework for Becoming Human (p. 4). Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.

Working collaboratively needs to become the norm.

“We’re advancing inclusive design now in Tech — which means that everyone’s individual identity and/or state will compete with each others’. Working collaboratively needs to become the norm.”

John Maeda’s #DesignInTech

So if intersectionality makes all of our social justice efforts so much better, why isn’t it a more prominent part of our social justice movements? I believe there are many reasons that may be why social justice movements have been slow to adopt intersectional practices:

• Intersectionality slows things down.
• Intersectionality brings people face-to-face with their privilege.
• Intersectionality decentralizes people who are used to being the primary focus of the movements they are a part of.
• Intersectionality forces people to interact with, listen to, and consider people they don’t usually interact with, listen to, or consider.

It’s not enough for you to personally believe in intersectionality. We need to start demanding intersectionality of all those who seek to join us in our social justice movements.

Everything we do publicly can be made more inclusive and uplifting with intersectionality, and everything we do can become exclusionary and oppressive without it. Intersectionality, and the recognition and confrontation of our privilege, can make us better people with better lives.

Oluo, Ijeoma. So You Want to Talk About Race (pp. 74-75, 77-79, 81-82). Da Capo Press. Kindle Edition.

Conflicts between the access needs of different individuals should be negotiated in class as part of the learning process.

Walker, Nick. Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities (p. 152). Autonomous Press.

Focus on the parts of the system that are most complex.

Intersectionality’s raison dêtre is to reveal the systems that organize our society. Intersectionality’s brilliance is that its fundamental contribution to how we view the world seems so common-sense once you have heard it: by focusing on the parts of the system that are most complex and where the people living it are the most vulnerable we understand the system best.

The Intersectional Presidency – Tressie McMillan Cottom – Medium

Encourage niches and affinity groups.

The most beautiful and horrifying thing about the Internet we know and love is its capacity for specificity.

There is no niche too small, no ideology too fringe, and no distance too great for affinity groups to coagulate and grow.

Where you were once a lone weirdo, you now have access to a community of several other weirdos…if you know where to find them.

UNHINGED: A Guide to Revolution for Nerds & Skeptics – YouTube

If we cannot hold space for our own complexity, if we cannot process even the existence of these intrapersonal dialectics, then we also cannot hold that space for the complexity of others and instead default back to this sort of knee jerk reaction, this binary understanding of right and wrong.

UNHINGED: A Guide to Revolution for Nerds & Skeptics – YouTube

Further Reading