Neurodivergent Base-Camp

Explaining what it is like to be autistic to non-autistic people can be difficult.

To quote Dawn Prince-Hughes (Cultural Autism Studies at Yale), being autistic is like “being human without the skin”. This can be difficult for non-autistic people to understand.

Seeing and feeling the blank looks and Double Empathy Problem (Milton, 2012) at a really extreme DEEP level and still desperately trying to explain how you feel is exhausting!

Writing 100,000-word text messages to your friends and colleagues to try and justify and validate why you can’t do something or why you have done it the way you have because you’re monotropic and don’t want to miss out on any details is a very real thing!

Being with people who understand and “get it” is validating and important.

We all need a base camp. A base camp is a niche place of safety and radical inclusion. It is a safe place where you can be yourself and explore your identity, a space where people ‘get you’, where there is a more level playing field of shared life experiences from which to form friendships and explore new terrain. A base camp is a validating space where people encourage you to be you and even expand your version of yourself. A space where different ways of communicating, moving and different sensory experiences are validated and where co-regulation is a foundation stone that enables inter-dependence and independence.

Base Camps come in many forms: families, face to face community groups and also online communities.

In collaboration with Stimpunks, I have been exploring Neuroqueer Learning Spaces. These primordial learning spaces enable everyone to thrive in their own authentic, unique ways. They provide a basecamp from which to explore and learn with others in your own way in your own time and in a space that is comfortable.

The three primordial learning spaces comprise of Campfires, Watering Holes and Cave Spaces:

Caves: Space for quiet reflection, introspection and self-directed learning.
A private space to transform learning from external knowledge to internal belief. Home of reflective construction.

Campfires: Space for learning with a storyteller, an elder or from others. Education facilitators need to subvert neuronormativity actively. They need to embark on their transformative neuroqueer journey so their re-storying can inspire neuro-cosmopolitanism.

Watering holes: Space for being with peers and social learning in validating neurodivergent ways by embracing parallel play and body doubling experiences.
Community enables thoughts and ideas to expand rhizomatically. Valuing differences and unique strengths expands creativity into new horizons and can create a collective flow full of potential.

Caves, campfires, and watering holes are:-

• Necessary to provide psychological safety and sensory safety.
• Necessary to positive niche construction.
• Necessary to intermittent collaboration
• Necessary to design for neurological pluralism.
• Essential to our conception of Cavendish Space.

Find out more about Neuroqueer Learning Spaces and also discover Stimpunks Learning Pathways on their website. Learning Pathways are nestled within the online rhizomatic forest of the Stimpunks website. Learning Pathways is a free, open-access online tool set up to support and guide you on your journey of self-discovery. It provides the tools to help empower you as an autistic, disabled or otherwise marginalised person to self-advocate for your needs and promotes agency and autonomy.

A learning pathway is a route a learner takes through a range of pages, modules, lessons, and courses to build knowledge progressively.

Pathways don’t need to be traversed in order. Pick what looks interesting. Choose your own adventure.

Pathways

• Autism Pathway
• Systems of Power Pathway
• Education Pathway