Relational success is thus not an individual achievement but an ecological one.
Sensory load, spatial arrangement, tempo and institutional routines profoundly shape interactional possibilities (De Jaegher 2023; Delafield-Butt et al. 2020; Eigsti 2013). Environments that impose rigid pacing, sensory unpredictability or narrow behavioural expectations constrain relational agency, whereas those that support movement, flexible timing and multiple channels of engagement create conditions in which diverse modes of sense-making can flourish.
Ahmetovic, De Jaegher, Williams & Grace, Spaces of Relational Opacity
When we read Spaces of Relational Opacity, we recognized a fellow traveler who had already met our friends on the road. The paper builds its case from enactive cognitive science and phenomenology — participatory sense-making, embodied perception, Being With. It cites McGoldrick and colleagues’ Autistic SPACE — a framework already standing in our garden. The convergence was not a surprise. It was a reunion.
Melika Ahmetovic, Hanne De Jaegher, Gemma Williams, and Joanna Grace argue that the friction in interactions between Autistic and non-Autistic people is not a property of the Autistic person. It is a property of the conditions. The lighting, the noise, the pacing, the demand for a fast and legible response. When those conditions are built for one kind of nervous system, the contributions of every other kind become — in their word — illegible. Not absent. Illegible. Made invisible by a room that was never going to read them.
This is a crosswalk of convergence. It converges toward us at the diagnosis, at the body, and at the pace of access. It hands us a name we did not yet have — relational opacity.
The misalignment lives in the room
The article’s thesis is our thesis. Communicative breakdown in mixed-neurotype settings reflects ecological misalignments and epistemic norms, rather than properties located within individuals. The breakdown is real. It is just not located where the deficit model insists on placing it. This is the double empathy problem — breakdown as a two-way rupture in mutuality, not a one-way failure in the Autistic person — carried all the way into classroom mechanics.
We say it in five words: broken systems, not broken people. The paper says it in the register of cognitive science, and the words line up. A student labeled resistant or non-compliant is, more often, a body in sensory overload inside an environment that offers no exit. Rename the student and you have explained nothing. Rebuild the room and you have changed everything.
There is no learning without the body
The paper treats sensory processing, motor coordination, and temporal rhythm not as secondary features of Autistic experience but as primary modes of world-formation. Perception is an activity of the living body, not a passive intake. From that standpoint, the behaviors a deficit lens calls repetitive or non-functional are recast as world-stabilizing practices — the nervous system doing exactly what it needs to do to stay coherent in an unpredictable environment.
This is sensory safety stated as cognitive science, and it is the line that runs straight through Cavendish Space. The authors’ practitioner list — quieter spaces for transitions, noise-reducing options, movement during instruction, tasks engageable through different sensory modalities — is a description of caves, campfires, and watering holes built for the body that is actually present. They name rocking, pacing, and grounding objects as legitimate regulation, not misbehavior to be extinguished. We have a word for handing the learner the right to shape those conditions: niche construction.
Inclusion cannot be achieved through behavioural modification; it requires transforming the sensory, temporal and spatial conditions under which interaction occurs. Environments that allow varied temporalities, movement patterns and sensory needs
create conditions in which autistic modes of sense-making can participate without distortion
(Ahmetovic and Kapp 2025).Ahmetovic, De Jaegher, Williams & Grace, Spaces of Relational Opacity
Flow is not a luxury
The article devotes a section to embodied flow dynamics — drawing on the same Autistic Flow Theory we draw on, and arriving at the same conclusion. When the double empathy problem is taken out of the equation, when Autistic people interact in Autistic space, rapport runs high and a distinctly Autistic sociality flourishes: a more generous assumption of common ground, a lower demand for coordination, shared enthusing, mutual monologing. The intense social flow they describe is reachable, they argue, through the very sensory and attentional differences the deficit model pathologizes — through the capacity to hyperfocus that monotropism names.
Flow states are a named element of Cavendish Space. The paper supplies the interactional evidence: flow is not just an individual absorption. Given the right conditions, it is something a room full of Autistic people can co-create.
The pace is the access
Neurotypical interaction presupposes a tempo — face-to-face posture, sustained eye contact, rapid turn-taking — and the paper is precise that this tempo is itself an access barrier. When environments are organized around it, the mismatch arises not from Autistic embodiment but from the design of the setting. The authors call instead for repertoires that include slower, parallel, and exploratory modes of coordination: side-by-side work, gesture and movement as valid response, participation recognized through sustained presence rather than speed.
That is intermittent collaboration by another name — group work punctuated by the right to withdraw, think, and re-enter on one’s own rhythm. And it is the time in SPACE-TIME: the recognition that pacing is not a courtesy extended to slow learners but a condition of access for everyone whose processing does not run on the standard clock. Supporting a student’s re-entry after a pause, the authors note, shifts the whole frame from performance to co-created coordination.
The name we did not have: relational opacity
Here is what this paper adds.
Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s right to opacity — the right not to be fully rendered transparent to another — the authors argue that not all meaning should, or can, be made immediately intelligible. Opacity is not a failure of communication. It is the irreducibility of embodied difference. A relational resource, not an obstacle. The micro-cues of a movement, a posture, a shift in tension carry significance precisely because a partner stays open to them without rushing to decode them.
Insisting on transparency may therefore do more harm to relational depth than allowing for ambiguity.
Ahmetovic, De Jaegher, Williams & Grace, Spaces of Relational Opacity
This sharpens something our pages gesture at but had not named. Cavendish Space defends cognitive liberty and somatic liberty — the right to your own mind, the right to give bodily expression to your neurodivergence. Relational opacity is the epistemic-justice layer beneath both: the right not to be fully known, decoded, or made legible on someone else’s terms as the price of recognition. If transparency becomes the requirement for being counted as a participant, then everyone whose expression diverges is pressed to perform a self they are not. An ethics of opacity refuses that bargain. It affirms the right to participate in relation without approximating the normative form.
The authors fold this into a stance for educators that we would put on a wall: not-yet-knowing is itself a legitimate and ethically necessary position, not a deficiency to be overcome. Opacity, they write, becomes a cue to adjust one’s stance — rather than adjusting the person.
Being With, and the practice we already keep
Joanna Grace’s account of Being With — developed alongside people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities — gives the ethic of opacity a relational form. Being With is not a technique for extracting meaning. It is a stance of shared presence that does not demand immediate intelligibility: remaining alongside movements, sounds, and orientations whose significance cannot yet be named, and letting them stay intact rather than translating them into compliance.
Allowing another to remain partially unknowable honours their autonomy and resists assimilative pressures.
Ahmetovic, De Jaegher, Williams & Grace, Spaces of Relational Opacity
We already keep the practice this names. The paper’s lineage runs through Phoebe Caldwell, Melanie Nind, and Dave Hewett — the same lineage that stands behind our Intensive Interaction entry. Being With is the ethical frame; Intensive Interaction is the practice that lives inside it. Reading them together is the point of a crosswalk: the philosophy and the method, finally in the same room.
From assimilation to solidarity
The article’s closing move is the one we make too. Inclusion, the authors write, shifts from assimilation to solidarity — and solidarity does not depend on sameness or full mutual comprehension. It depends on a commitment to share a world with people whose embodied orientations differ markedly from your own, and a willingness to reshape environments so those orientations can be sustained. That is mutual aid, written in the grammar of relational ethics. Not tolerance. Not accommodation as afterthought. A standing commitment to change the conditions so that difference can stay.
Systemic change of this kind begins not with large-scale reform alone but with local acts of institutional patience: one teacher who allows a student to rock, one school that co-designs its sensory spaces with autistic students, one policy that replaces compliance with co-creation.
Ahmetovic, De Jaegher, Williams & Grace, Spaces of Relational Opacity
Read
Read Spaces of Relational Opacity – Participatory Sense-Making and the Ethics of Being With Autistic People by Melika Ahmetovic, Hanne De Jaegher, Gemma Williams, and Joanna Grace (Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 2026). It is published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence — free to read, share, and build on with credit. A practitioner handout translating its concepts into classroom principles is included with the article.
