This course is a space for those who often feel misread or misfitted in rooms not built with them in mind: neurodivergent thinkers, feelers, and practitioners who carry depth, intensity, sensitivity, or divergence that’s pathologised or sidelined. It’s also for those holding neurodivergent clients, students, or colleagues, who want to go beyond accommodation into genuine reimagining. Drawing from our lived experience as a neurodivergent educators and parents, and our deep critique of normative systems, this course insists on dignity over deficit and presence over performance.
We begin by questioning normativity itself. What does it mean to be the one asked to adapt? Drawing on your writing about epistemic injustice and invisible strain, we map the unspoken rules that exclude or exhaust neurodivergent people.
This week we explore what it means to lead, live, or learn with dignity when constantly misread. We’ll bring in language that reflects dignity, not dysfunction.
We challenge the idea that attention, expression, or interaction must look a certain way. Through stories, embodiment, and design thinking, we reflect on your phrase “politics of presence” and how to be in the room without betraying ourselves.
In our final session, we consider the possibility of systemic redesign. From family to workplace, from school to therapy room and ask what could change if the default were built for divergence? We close with practices for sustaining neuro-affirming environments.
The inclusion discourse is not enough. The real question is: who is the room built for, and who does it erase by default?In education, therapy, activism, and institutional life, neurodivergence is still too often treated as disruption rather than design. This course arises from the need to shift that paradigm. It builds on our work around “relational architecture” and slow, ethical presence calling for radical redesign and reimagining.
This 4-week online course includes live 90-minute weekly sessions with space for sharing, thinking, feeling, and unmasking. You’ll receive access to reflective prompts, reading excerpts, and optional journalling between sessions. We meet in a neuro-affirming space — flexible, scaffolded, and lightly held, with care taken around sensory overwhelm, cognitive load, and shame.
Tone: gentle, smart, subversive. No fixing. Just making space.
neurodivergence dignity not diagnosis relational design epistemic justice non-normative presencefamily systems
