AbstractIn many putatively "progressive" academic and research cultures, metrics, rankings, and binary judgments about success or failure are becoming central features of institutional life. These cultures reflect a punitive and performance-driven ethos, undermining the conditions for creative, speculative, and care-based forms of intellectual inquiry. These environments often pre-script who the "winners" and "losers" are allowed to be. As institutions continue to reward able-bodied, neurotypical and high achieving scholars/practitioners over those with a different set of physical, cognitive and intellectual make up it tends to become disabling to continue to navigate these structures at workplace and keep up with its pace. In a geopolitical context of hardening of borders—physical, intellectual, and cognitive—congealing into what Stacy Alaimo calls a Trumpian Petro-masculinity, the last thing we need are institutions that (un)wittingly reproduce or extend this logic. Recognition of difference sits at the heart of diverse economies scholarship; it is the precondition for renegotiating the terms of economy, knowledge, and community. Yet neurodivergence and disability often remain marginal in conversations about diversity. In this session we invite researchers, practitioners, and students in our network who self-identify as neurodivergent and/or disabled as well as those who have been/are being disabled by the workings of dominant institutions. Recognizing that "difference is not a deficit; it is the raw material for re-worlding" this session is an opportunity to extend our shared sensibility—valuing "different ways of knowing, being, and doing"—toward a richer, more enabling praxis of inclusion. How can we support and make space for radically different ways of knowing, being, and doing in the world—especially within research, education, and the institutions we move through? Or better yet, taking inspiration from Franco Berardi's Quit Everything what are the ways that we might (re)sign from institution and ways of working that no longer work, how might we withdraw our labour power from that which we would no longer serve? Questions we wish to consider: 1. How does neurodivergence or disability inform your scholarship and professional practice?2. What strategies or resources sustain you in university or non-university research spaces?3. How might our network better recognise and benefit from cognitive difference?4. What forms of mutual support would you like to see emerge from this group?
Participants: All our welcome but session is for researchers, practitioners, and students in our network who self-identify as neurodivergent and/or disabled as well as those who have been/are being disabled by the workings of dominant institutions.Structure:Opening welcome & access check-in (10 min)Open reflections guided by advance questions (60 min)Collective mapping of support needs & next steps (15 min)Closing grounding (5 min)Practicalities• Access: Live-captioning and a shared notes doc will be provided. Please tell us any additional access requirements when you register.• Confidentiality: The session will not be recorded. Collective take-aways will be shared only with participants, unless we all agree otherwise.• Facilitation: The conversation will be lightly facilitated by peer hosts who also identify as neurodivergent/disabled.
