Cutting our own keys: New possibilities of neurodivergent storying in research

Increasingly, neurodivergent people are sharing their own narratives and conducting their own research. Prominent individuals have integrated the ‘nothing about us without us’ slogan, used by neurodivergent and other disabled social activists, into academia. This article imagines a neuromixed academia. We consider how to work through challenges present in neuromixed encounters; to support cross-neurotype communication and pave the way for an ethos of community and collaboration. We explore how we might create a space in which neurodivergent experiences are seen as just one part of our complex and multifaceted identities. We do this through the process of ‘cutting our own keys’, to try out new possibilities of neurodivergent storying aimed at finding ourselves in our own stories about neurodivergence. This involves borrowing and developing methodological approaches formulated outside of research on different forms of neurodivergence, and to invent our own concepts based on our own embodied experiences and the social worlds we inhabit. Throughout, we mingle our own autoethnographic accounts in relation to research accounts and theories, as a way of illustrating the work with the text as a thinking about neurodivergence with each other in itself.

Lay abstract

A lot of people who do research are also neurodivergent (such as being autistic or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), but neurodivergent people do not always feel welcome in research spaces which are often shaped around neurotypical people. Some neurotypical researchers lack confidence in talking to neurodivergent people, and others feel like neurodivergent people might not be able to do good research about other people who are like them without being biased. We think it is important that all researchers are able to work well together, regardless of whether they are neurotypical, autistic, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (or any other neurotype) – in truly ‘neurodiverse’ teams. In this article we talk about how to create better spaces for all researchers, where we feel valued for who we are and take each others’ needs into account. We do this using some approaches from other areas of research and talking about how they relate to our personal experiences of being neurodivergent researchers with our own personal stories. This article adds to a growing work on how we can work with people who are different from us, in more respectful and kind ways.