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

Abstract

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.