Educational spaces

The question of inclusive spatiality is one of bodies and spaces as much as it is one of policies and procedures. There is more empirical research on schools focusing on materiality from a neurodiversity perspective than there is research on the workplace (cf. Benozzo et al., 2021; Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, 2019; Grant & Kara, 2021; Lambert & Harriss, 2022; Seers & Hogg, 2021). Engaging with wider debates on inclusive schooling is beyond the scope of this paper. What I want to outline here is how schools themselves are framed as material spaces that help or hinder neurodivergent learning and wellbeing, and how spaces of learning in turn are not limited to schools. Much of this scholarship seeks to validate neurodiversity in the classroom, offer evidence for ways to make the classroom a more accessible environment, and affirm the worth of neurodivergent students qua neurodivergent and center their voices. But as several scholars have shown, this affirmation is not universally available. Some may leverage both medical diagnoses and neurodivergent identities to students' advantage. However, neurodiversity-affirming labels are only available to some, while pathologizing diagnoses can have severe consequences for those excluded from what can only be called the category of the "deserving neurodivergent."

Centering the voices of autistic students was the priority of one research team. Costley et al. (2023) sought to do so by positioning their participants as "co-researchers" who helped shape the research agenda around experiences of anxiety in school. In defining the problem, students reported a familiar range of social, sensory and pedagogical challenges, while their spatial framing of the school was that of a container for a difficult social environment exacerbated by specific physical characteristics. The team took an "ecological systems approach" to participatory research, which situates the autistic co-researcher in their family and community contexts that are both fields of intervention (Costley et al., 2023, p. 694). But space largely takes the guise of bodily mobility within the school, especially when seeking "safe places" (Costley et al., 2023, p. 698).

In a separate results paper, Costley et al. (2021, p. 2) note that in the previous literature, school support for autistic students generally comes in two forms, minimizing adverse environmental factors, and encouraging resilience. These are explicitly spatial in that they typically involve permission to minimize physical exposure to stressors of the sort initially reported by the students. But in terms of the team's thematic analysis of their data, the students reported uncertainty, assessment, and others' behaviors (including bullying) as causes of anxieties. None of these derived themes are specifically spatial. Rather, the analysis relegates space to the details of some of the support on offer, such as calm and ordered classrooms, permission to pass between classes earlier than other students, and time-out passes to physically withdraw from the classroom, as well as self-help such as "fidgeting" (stimming) out of sight such as under a table (Costley et al., 2021, pp. 7–8). Again, the school is largely a container for anxiety-provoking relationships and expectations.

An entirely separate methodological paper on participatory research with autistic students is unsurprising, given that most research on schools still center parents and teachers. Jan Wilson (2017) engages with Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a difference-affirming approach to education first proposed in the 1990s, as a way forward for including neurodivergent students in the classroom. She starts with a familiar story of a multiply neurodivergent child repeatedly escaping the classroom in an under-resourced school not designed for her needs. The child is hers, and her daughter's "inclusion" in the regular classroom was anything but. She writes, "This vantage point has led me to call here for a 'radical' shift in focus away from pathologizing discourses and policies that attempt to fit students with disabilities into classrooms and curricula designed for a mythical 'able-bodied,' neurotypical, white, male, middle-class 'norm' and toward a consideration of how classrooms, pedagogy, curricular materials, and cultural practices of schools can be transformed in order to accommodate all students" (Wilson, 2017).

Wilson outlines three multiplicities required for UDL: multiple methods of representation (different ways of communicating information), multiple means of engagement (motivating students) and multiple means of expression (students communicating their knowledge). These involve material practices ranging from showing visual media, to encouraging students to shape teaching, to allowing students to show their knowledge through performance. All these materialities shape the learning environment in profound ways. Likewise, Tomlinson and Newman (2017) advocate UDL on similar grounds (see also von Below et al., 2021). They recruited adult writers to talk about their needs at university, work and elsewhere. The participants highlighted qualities of the physical environment, ranging from appropriate office supplies to the ability to move around the space. Sound was another priority, but not necessarily as something to avoid: "Four discussed auditory stimuli they found helpful—two listened to instrumental music, while two others either composed aloud or recorded themselves while writing" (Tomlinson & Newman, 2017, pp. 100–101).

While this underscores UDL's embodied and material aspects, the focus is largely on process that takes place in the container of the place of learning. UDL advocates are clear that the container overflows; learning takes place outside the classroom, while contextual factors affect what happens inside (for a related if somewhat more individualizing strengths-based approach, see Sewell & Park, 2021). Indeed, some studies examine neurodivergent learning outside the classroom, such as a summer camp in the US (Simpson et al., 2024), and in the bush in the case of an indigenous Australian autistic boy: "Willow [his mother] was enthusiastic about 'going on Country' as a form of therapy for her son, telling traditional stories and imparting knowledge about local flora and fauna as a way to connect him with his heritage and to help him 'self-regulate'" (Lilley et al., 2020, p. 1865).

All these learning spaces are designed (or at least selected) to contain objects, practices and relationships that facilitate neurodivergent learning. There is also closer attention to ways educators relabel their students' behaviors. Sewell and Park (2021) examine how an educational psychologist trained staff to see "challenging" ADHD behavior in a different way. Teachers began to understand such "symptoms" as stress responses to the students' environment, "in which repeated failure and censure from teachers had an erosive effect on motivation and engagement" (Sewell & Park, 2021, p. 686). Likewise Pluquailec (2018) examines the potential for restorying neurodivergent behaviors and emotions. She takes inspiration from Sara Ahmed's (2004) concept of an affective economy to approach the classroom as a relational space. Here, a child's bite might be taken to express an emotion as an in-the-moment socio-spatial mediation between her, her teacher and the classroom environment. This reframes the bite from a sign of an inherent pathology of "challenging behavior" that has discursively sedimented over time in the school. The spatiality here is one of circulating affects and signs, but still contained within the space of the school.

The term "inclusion" evokes space-as-container, which is not a criticism. Containing bodies within, partitioning bodies between, and channelling bodies through particular spaces are key ways of regulating society. Furthermore, what bodies are in a space can define that space, while what space bodies are in can define those bodies, hence the sense of being out of place when the two do not align. This is where the limitation lies. Making the school, university or workplace a safe container for neurodiversity as a generic category of difference by making it a less "toxic" environment (Shiels et al., 2021) is a laudable goal. However, reifying neurodiversity as an object of containment only goes so far. If we reframe this more precisely as seeking a space that can contain all forms of neurodivergent embodiment—with their range of cognitive styles, sensory issues, emotional expressions, and needs for movement—the problems become clearer. All these are simultaneously produced through and embedded in other power relations.

The consequences are two-fold. First, this suggests that principles such as "universal design" are more utopian visions than achievable goals. Wilson (2017, p. 8) is clear that UDL is meant to be all-inclusive, not just of disability, but there is a sense in which the "discredited bodies" she seeks to include are disabled or racialized or gendered. The classroom becomes a container for discrete differences. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the freedoms of emotional expression and mobility scholars advocate for neurodivergent people are not equally accessible (Grant & Kara, 2021). Spatializing the school or the workplace as a container not only provides a discrete refuge for different embodiments. It discursively separates those "neurodiverse" bodies from the other power relations that materially position them in particular ways, with different vulnerabilities. Lilley et al.'s (2020) indigenous Australian participant alludes to this separation of identities when she points toward Country, away from the formal classroom, as space where her autistic son can be his whole self. Other intersectional accounts of neurodiversity offer ways of thinking beyond container-space.

Beyond container-space

The spatiality of Kimberlé Crenshaw's (1991) intersection metaphor has been addressed repeatedly over the years (see Nash, 2017), and neurodiversity has been added to the mix of power relations (Erevelles & Minear, 2010; Krazinski, 2023; Udonsi, 2022). Here I focus on the limits of space-as-container in neurodiversity work, and how moving beyond this spatiality goes hand-in-hand with some modes of intersectional thinking. When considering neurodivergence as simultaneously racialized, classed and subject to cis-heteronormativity, its spatiality can be difficult to contain. A crucial insight of intersectional neurodiversity work is that a container for difference is not an innocent space. Creating a distinct space that ostensibly welcomes neurodiversity is not necessarily an innocent act, especially when it contains and thereby segregates difference. Attending to intersecting differences within such a space undermines the fantasy of container-space's discreteness and boundedness.

Several scholars have researched racialization as a key intersecting process. Leon Hilton examines the case of a Black autistic non-speaking teenager, Avonte Oquendo, who had a need to move, to run. After going missing for several months after escaping from his New York City school, his body was found, and the medical examiner determined he most likely drowned in the East River, perhaps due to his fascination with water infrastructure, along with trains and cars (Hilton, 2017, p. 222). A federal law was proposed to fund "voluntary" electronic tracking devices for autistic students and alarm systems for special education classrooms. However, Hilton argues, "Avonte's Law directly, if tacitly, emanates from principles of surveillance and extends the police as a modern institution and power formation that has historically constellated itself around the surveillance of blackness, and especially of the black body in motion" (Hilton, 2017, p. 224). A blurred surveillance camera image of Avonte running from school saturated the city, "index[ing] an unruly and uncontrollable subject, incapable of controlling an impulse toward movement" (Hilton, 2017, pp. 225–226).

Here autism's inscrutability combines with the Black body's hypervisibility, reflecting a long, intertwined history of racist and ableist forms of surveillance and spectacle that denied Avonte his personhood. Autistic wandering inherits the state surveillance attracted by what Fred Moten calls the Black "fugitive law of movement" (Moten, 2009, p. 230, cited in Hilton, 2017) that seeks to contain unruly bodies. Hilton does not dismiss the dilemmas around safety posed by wandering (Wilson, 2017), but seeks to problematize converging white and neurotypical urges toward containment and denial of autonomy. The task is to find alternative ways of accommodating the need to move on neurodivergent people's own terms, without relying upon racializing practices and technologies of control (see also (Erevelles & Minear, 2010; Solomon & Lawlor, 2018).

Neurodivergent embodiment exceeds the containers that white, neurotypical society seeks to confine it in. However, power relations that expose neurodivergent individuals to risks of harm in different ways also work to undermine bounded conceptions of the spaces in which they are supposedly contained. Ralph Savarese writes of his autistic son benefitting in school from having highly educated and well-to-do parents by dint of sheer luck (Savarese, 2018, p. 28). Class and racial privilege enable them to enter into the educational system, navigate it and change it (however piecemeal) from within. But however supportive a school may be, it is pursuing a regulatory project.

This project includes white students. Jaysane-Darr (2020, p. 272) shows how therapists working in wealthy white communities understand neurodivergent emotions as both threat to and opportunity for whiteness. For them, "emotional diversity is either an asset or a barrier that must be managed in the pursuit of higher education and economic success." Their professional practice contributes to a "biopolitics of emotion," in which assessing and disciplining students' emotional expressions and even experiences are key. This is so, regardless of whether the therapist's object of intervention is "emotionally suspect behaviour or neurodiversity" (Jaysane-Darr, 2020, p. 272). This is a rare look at interpersonal encounters between therapist and client from a neurodiversity perspective. Jaysane-Darr's participants worked in mostly affluent white areas, and their approach to their (presumably white) clients were highly individualizing. While they were required to contain clients at the metaphorical level by categorizing them according to tick boxes on forms, they were also "navigating the spectrum" and "navigating emotional diversity" by gaining an understanding of neurodivergent people's embodied, sensory experiences of space.

However, some parents can use the discourse of neurodiversity to advantage when their child is perceived to be disturbing the space of the classroom. Elsa Davidson (2021, p. 1141) characterizes parental wielding of "sensory issues" as an "auratically scientific force that neutralizes potentially negative moral judgments about children, and by extension, parents—for those in a position to deploy this force." But this claim to innocence operates at a larger scale than the classroom. Davidson (2021, p. 1141) shows how the mismatch of the classroom's sensory environment to neurodivergent students' sensoria has a larger geography in white and middle-class neighborhoods and schools. She argues the deployment of children's sensory issues for their advantage is racialized and classed. "Such benefits point to the implication of the child sensorium in a broader 'biopolitics of disability' (Mitchell & Snyder, 2015 cited in Puar, 2017, p. xvii) in which those with class and racial privilege have their disability/difference recognized and can pursue a label of neurodiversity as a form of risk management, a privilege that must be understood as generally unavailable to poor children and children of color who experience slow debilitation through daily exposure to exclusionary and under-resourced schools, lack of adequate shelter, and inadequate forms of support under conditions of neoliberal disinvestment, and whose disabilities may be responded to with state violence instead of recognition (Puar, 2017)" (E. Davidson, 2021, p. 1141; see also Udonsi, 2022; Waltz, 2020, p. 24).

Others have made the point that neurodivergent diagnoses can be dangerous for global majority students. However, many of these critiques of the racialization of neuronormativity point toward sanism, especially anti-Black sanism (Pickens, 2019). Meerai et al. (2016) explore this in terms of mental health diagnoses such as schizophrenia in schools in Toronto, where Black boys are four times as likely to be diagnosed as other students. Here diagnosis connects the space of the school to the carceral spaces of the psychiatric hospital; Black boys and men are far more likely to be confined against their will and such "psychiatric aggressions toward Black bodies" are crucial to the school-to-prison pipeline (Meerai et al., 2016, p. 19). The authors situate their argument in terms of mad studies. However, my point here is that racialized neurodivergent embodiment puts pressure on container space in distinctive ways by showing how even carceral space—the ultimate strategy for containing unruly and threatening bodies—is never simply a discrete space in which they are contained in isolation from wider power relations, (geo)politics and histories.

Constitutive spaces

Ben Belek takes a more Latourian approach to neurodivergence to explore how autistic adults often focus more on sensory than social differences in defining themselves. Latour's (2007) actor-network theory dethrones "the human" as the sole location of agency. It locates agency in the non-human as well as the human, both of which are themselves "assemblages" or networks, and both of which can be a part of other networks. Change emerges from shifting relations within these networks. Networks/assemblages are a form of spatiality, and so Latour's account makes change a question of space as much as one of time. In this ontology, a body cannot be a discrete, contained object. Belek glosses Latour's (2004) definition of the body, which may or may not be human: "the quintessential property of the body, which singles it out from other objects, is its continual process of learning to be affected" (Belek, 2019, p. 30). 1 This has spatial consequences. "As one learns to discriminate between increasingly subtle contrasts in the surrounding, the environment itself is modified" (Belek, 2019, pp. 30–31). Particular aspects of one's environment become more differentiated and perceptible: "A more sensitive body, therefore, ultimately means a richer world" (Belek, 2019, p. 31).

Belek's focus is on adult autistics' "process of learning themselves as autistic" in support groups (Belek, 2019, p. 37). Participants learned from each other to articulate what they previously thought of as individual idiosyncrasies in their sensorium as specifically autistic experiences. They reconfigured their bodily relationship to their environment by learning a new vocabulary for bodily distress, ranging from "trigger" to "meltdown." Doing so in an autistic social environment was key to increasing their sensitivity to their surroundings. As their perception of their environment was reshaped, so too was their embodied agency to react to it and reshape it in turn. "Autistic communities…enable the bringing about of autistic bodies, where before, there were only bodies with autism" (Belek, 2019, p. 31).

Erin Felepchuk (2021) also takes a more-than-human approach to stimming by arguing that this negotiation between a person's bodymind and their environment is an improvisation. Framing stimming as improvisation counters the neuronormative construction of stimming as "mere" repetition, an understanding that denies autistics agency, but also severs the specific relationship that a bodymind has to its environment in a particular place and time. Crucially, Felepchuk (2021) argues that "stimming is an improvisatory interaction with the affordances of our environment. In other words, we stim according to the opportunities or barriers that are presented to us by our environments." These affordances can change, as in the case of COVID-19. Masks, according to Felepchuk, make using chewelry impossible and can therefore prompt a new form of stimming (e.g. chewing gum) for maintaining sensory equilibrium within the new environment, and thus enabling access to spaces that would otherwise be inaccessible due to mask mandates.

This is not to claim stimming as an inherent good. Felepchuk acknowledges the potential for it to be self-injurious or interpreted by police as a threat when someone from the global majority performs this "improvisation." To revisit a point raised earlier, neurodivergent improvisations can form an assemblage with melanin in relation to the affordances of a white supremacist society, with disastrous results (Saldanha, 2006). As Vanessa Thompson (2021, p. 65) notes, "as various initiatives against racial profiling also emphasise, racist policing extends the actual policing incident in time and space, across individuals and across generations." Belek does not raise such possibilities, and so power relations other than neuronormativity are absent from the spatial production of autistic bodies and worlds in his account. Autistic space, like container space in the previous section, becomes reified as a discrete thing that paradoxically floats free of other power relations.

Remi Yergeau (2020) shares this broad commitment to the affective relationship between body and space as they explore the discursive production of a folk disorder, Cassandra Affective Deprivation Disorder (CADD). They are particularly attentive to how this deeply ableist construction intersects with a profound heteronormativity. Advocates for the existence of this "disorder" figure embodied proximity to autistics as a risk. Neurotypical women bear this risk in heterosexual relationships with autistic men, whose supposed extreme male brains pose a risk to heterosexual futurity. In allegedly depriving their women partners of affection, these men "deprive neurotypicals of intimacy and sanity" (Yergeau, 2020, p. 213). Self-styled sufferers of CADD frame themselves as victims of abuse, however unintentional, whose suffering is not taken seriously by others. This perceived gaslighting compounds their social and spatial isolation, as "relatives cannot bear witness to all of the sex that one is not having, to all of the non-intimacies that might percolate in an autistic-NT partnership" (Yergeau, 2020, p. 213). This silencing produces an arhetoricity that resembles autism itself, as CADD advocates figure autistics as inherently incommunicative and lacking moral accountability (Yergeau, 2018). Autism becomes a contagion for heteronormativity, as "being in the mere presence of autism is enough to descend the non-autistic into madness as well as queerness" (Yergeau, 2020, p. 123). The ableist and anti-queer assumptions underlying this diagnosis construct a peculiar spatiality for autistic-NT intimacy. Such intimacy is something to avoid: "Quick, neurotypicals—swipe left! swipe left!" (Yergeau, 2020, 213). It is also a dispositive (Oswin & Olund, 2010), where intimacy is a productive object of regulation through which autistic (a)sexuality can and should be rehabilitated by those few heroic experts who believe these Cassandras (Yergeau, 2020, p. 219). 2

Finally, Brendan Hart (2014) provocatively argues that some forms of applied behavior analysis (ABA) can paradoxically further a neurodiversity approach to producing autistic personhood. Parents engage in "joint embodiment" with their autistic children to facilitate their presence as autistic in the social world and become part of their child's "prosthetic environment." These include physical objects ranging from "sensory toys, to picture-based daily planners, to adaptive spoons with thick, easy-to-grasp handles" (Hart, 2014, p. 298). As part of this prosthetic environment, such objects can combine with practices in the form of therapies. They, according to Hart (2014, p. 298), "provide an 'artificial platform' and a technical infrastructure for the public establishment of autistic personhood…[in] social worlds not built to their specifications. In the process, these worlds are themselves being reconfigured." It's beyond the scope of this paper to debate ABA. 3 What interests me here is the conceptual claim about the mutual constitution of personhood and space. Everybody inhabits a prosthetic environment, and this is a key thing to acknowledge. Just as some forms of stimming do not "fit" and thus fairly demand a response, a prosthetic environment that can facilitate an autistic's engagement with the world on their own terms will also elicit a response from that environment. As with Belek, there is a sole focus on affirming neurodiversity, but the spatial affordances here as with Felepchuk are open-ended, allowing other power relations to have a place, for good or for ill.