The 2023–2024 teacher–researcher fellowship, titled Neurodiversity as Relation in Arts Education, was carried out by Aion Arribas in collaboration with antje nestel. Prior to the fellowship, we created a collective called shy*play. This collective focuses on doing neurodiversity not as a process of explanation but as a relational practice in difference. We use art-as-process and (un)learning techniques with the aim of creating socialities with their own values, outside the workings of normality and identification.

Throughout the fellowship, we developed a three-day course in art education focused on the creative and transformative potentials of neurodiversity. The course aims to contribute to an affirmative paradigm—often referred to as the “neurodiversity paradigm”—moving away from a pathologizing paradigm. It asks: How can neurodiversity guide us toward new futures, values, and ways of knowing, perceiving, and relating? It seeks to experiment with what neurodiversity can do by involving neurodivergent and non-neurodivergent people, as well as the more-than-human. Interrelations are what we are after.

For us, neurodiversity is not merely a set of identities defined in relation to a norm. Likewise, the norm is not a natural state of being, doing, or thinking, but a social construction that sustains itself by presenting itself as natural. This occurs in part through the establishment of conditions that frame and maintain certain forms of embodiment, such as “properly” moving, talking, and thinking subjects. Our course seeks to shift these conditions by offering techniques for embodied relation, informed by neurodivergent tendencies and characteristics.

Our approach to building the course drew on how many neurodivergent bodyminds experience the world: synesthetic perception in which the environment and the senses interrelate; an understanding of movement and proprioception as inherently ecological and not entirely ownable by an individual subject; and a use of language that operates not exclusively as representation but as a sensing practice in its own right, often foregrounding metaphor and poetic expression. See below for more about the course.

During the fellowship, we also organized a symposium titled What If … Neurodiversity, which concluded the fellowship. The symposium was a one-day event for a broader public, bringing together presenters whose practices experiment with the potential of neurodiverse movement, poetics, and perception—along with their many intersections—to create new (neurodiverse) futures now. Click here for more about the symposium.