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I’ve begun a project over the past year conducting research into worldbuilding. As readers will have noticed I’m really interested in the diversity of worlds we inhabit, both physical and digital, and the ways that these worlds can serve as sites for presence, connection, collaboration, and communication. There’s a shadow side to these capabilities as the worlds we inhabit can also be sites for opppression and control. It is important to acknowledge that the worlds we inhabit are indeed plural worlds and not just a single homogenous world. I’ve often observed the ways that we shuttle back and forth between worlds (and identities which are facets of ourselves that we can perform or inhabit) can be an act of resistance to avoid or resist forms of coercive control and oppression. This is especially true for neurominorities, whose embodied difference is most cogently expressed as a difference in communication and cognitive style, both elements which are either facilitated or closed down by the parameters of a communicative lifeworld. Perhaps the worst form of oppression you can subject another human person to is to close down their world-choices to a single homogenous space with parameters that they cannot readily inhabit. Take, for example, the insistence that Deaf people inhabit a hearing world, or that our Blind friends inhabit a sighted world. This conviction about world pluralism lies at the heart of the social model of disability, and in conversations I’ve had with friends and colleagues about disability, it seems like the core problem that prevents them from inhabiting empathetic understanding is a lack of understanding about the multiplicity of worlds we can inhabit. I’ve often found forms of philosophical realism, at least by some definitions based on the insistence that we inhabit a singlar common world, to be a worrisome tool for the unselfconscious-privileged to try to exert control over others. And this insistence that we ignore differences and multiplicity, dangerous and cruel.

To dig a bit more into the meaning of this insight for neurominorities, let me highlight a few examples. For someone with sensory hypersensitivity like me, the lack of dampening and the loud/brightness of environments can be a recipe for disaster. Our build enviroment is often designed around a single sensory experience, cost cutting around noise dampening can seem reasonable if you haven’t inahbited the sensory world of another person. Patterned decorations on walls and floors can be oppressively overstimulating, even nauseating, or inducing vertigo for some people.

A key part of worldbuilding relates to the forms of communication we enable and disable, and this is particularly acute with digital platforms. I was getting re-aquainted with the OG chat platform IRC a few weeks ago and some of the design features really stuck out having been away for several years. IRC doesn’t have a chat history, so you can’t jump into a room and catch-up. It’s purely synchronous, with messages appearing in real time, and if you’re not logged in, once you join back on you only have access to the lines which arise from that point forward. You can always put up a message or send a direct message to someone asking them to update you on the conversation that has ensued, but these are the demands of a stateless communication environment. A bit like real life.

This isn’t a problem for some people who don’t engage with long-term memory in an intensive way, and I know some who enjoy the ephemeral nature of IRC (and similar environments like raves and parties) who can just “drop in” and catch up to the extent they want to, but perhaps also simmer a bit in a sublime statelessness. Contrast this with some kinds of autistic cognitive experience which are oriented around a more saturated perception of the world, taking in more sensory and other perceptual data without filtering as much out, in some cases (at least it feels this way!) without filtering anything at all. When I’m in a room for a meeting, I’m processing all the body language, poses, microexpressions of all the people around me, unable really to filter it, short of wearing a blindfold, and even then I’ll pick up a lot from tone and speech patterns, which again are forms of noise I can’t really filter much. So we take a lot more in, unavoidably, and as a result we need longer to process it all, more time to recover from that kind of full saturation, and also tend to have more accurate recollections. You can read a bit more about this in Precise minds in uncertain worlds: Predictive coding in autism. But we also have diverse ways of getting to back to a comfortable baseline in light of this saturation. A person might narrow their experiences and environments until they’re receiving a level that isn’t overwhelming. Or you might find (sometimes pharmaceautical) ways to dull your senses through adrenaline or dopamine dumping. In other cases, you might simply work through it all and synthesise everything that is coming at you.

Personally, I find that when the atmosphere or my experience of it has some jagged edges, where I’m missing some information, those jagged edges really scream at me until I can resolve them. This might arise when I join at the second half of a conversation missing the previous context, someone has a mood or reaction that can’t be explained by the current conversation, or we’re being introduced to a new policy which really can’t be explained by the justification that’s being provided. Sometimes places and not just people have these jagged screaming edges for me. And the only real way to quiet that noise is to sort things out and get my head around what’s going on. I’d hypothesise that many people that we encounter who are unusually pastoral or compassionate might be driven by a similar kind of alterity, it’s not just that you care (though of course this is the foundation), but that you need to understand what’s going on with a person. Following this kind of natural drive leads to a lifetime of practice which produces people who are fluent in cross-cultural communication, at stretching beyond the horizon of their own lifeworld into that of someone else. Many autistic bodyminds are also highly systematic, constantly searching for the patterns which lend coherence to that information you’re taking in. This can be a kind of hyper-relationality, the person you go to when you need to catch up on the happenings in your community.

For all these reasons, stateless communication contexts are really uncomfortable for me. When I log into a slack room, discord, or MS teams page, I’ll read the entire history up to where I left off previously. I can’t help it, each message hits me with a demand that I understand it’s meaning. To avoid such a thing feels like an abrogation of community, relationship, and even just basic perception of the world around me. I’m not sure I’m wrong about this, either.

It occurred to me, on reflection, that I’ve always gravitated towards stateful or synchronous communication styles, probably for this reason. Contrast IRC with email, which is straight-forwardly stateful and transactional – you send an email, you get a response. And when you read that response, you have all the information without any gaps in the middle, or invisible histories. But there is also a contrast here with other contemporary platforms, and the ways we use email inasmuch as we make use of and have access to forms of message threading. Think of it this way, if you’re in a room with 15 people all talking, all having different discussions with each other, meaning at least half the people are talking, those conversations aren’t necessarily linked to one another in any meaningful way outside of the influences produced by the atmosphere of the room and the exigencies of the moment. Each of those conversations has it’s own coherence which may not be linked to any of the others. Why don’t we find this overwhelming? Well in many cases, people use eye-contact, bodily closeness and other cues to hone in on the specific conversation that is intended for them. In this way threading is about visibility and proximity. Well designed social media works this way too, if you’re in a room with many conversations happening, messages might be threaded into each other based on a visual reminder of what the poster is replying to, or the use of thematic hastags. Now imagine there are 100 people all in a room chatting at the same time but you’re all blindfolded, and everyone is speaking into a microphone which is then aggregated and fed into headphones so you don’t have the usual cues to separate out the different threads of conversation. That’s pretty much my experience of every room – even when I have the visual cues, I can’t shut out the other conversations (or at least I can but only by using quite a lot of physical and mental energy which will definitely run out quickly). Scott Christian Salva has a really nice video he’s produced to share what this is like:

Some digital environments, or at least the ways we use them, can produce conversations with the same kind of messiness for some people. On discord or slack you can quickly make a break-out room, a sub-conversation within a channel. MS Teams, not so much. Some platforms all you to visually mute mesages in a stream which don’t have a specific tag. This is also the case for omnibus email newsletters with huge chains of information which isn’t necessarily tied to a moment. Some people feel comfortable skipping sections and scanning quickly. I read all the text.

Just like in architecture and the crafting of a building or some other built environment as an act of worldbuilding, each of these platforms is designed to project an extension or amplification of our personal world’s structures, the kinds of presence and availability we find comfortable, the pace, rhythm and texture of communication. While some forms of worldbuilding like writing fiction, have craft cultures which are oriented around horizon-crossing, crafting a world which opens up into a mode of being which isn’t your own through trans-cultural, trans-racial, or trans-species writing. But some of our worldbuilding discourses and craft don’t really seem to be oriented by this kind of horizon-crossing as an exercise. It strikes me that, at least at presence, the people who build worlds we inhabit as common spaces, don’t really do this kind of work, except for some noteworthy exceptions. To do this we’d need to have modes of participatory and collaborative design which opens up these experiments in horizon-crossing in deliberate ways, and provides participants who have been subjected to silencing and oppression time and space to discover their own suppressed or masked modes of inhabitation. There’s an increasing conversation about digital accessibility, but it strikes me that most of this conversation is about legal liability, law compliance, and even corporate branding. It be amazing if we could find ways, in our communities and organisations, to open up forms of participatory design which were inclusive, open ended, and prepared for the emotional and financial costliness of this kind of experiment.

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What’s the best way to work? There has been a lot of bluster (and cruelty) by business executives seeking to enforce a rollback on remote working, which in some cases (like mine) was forcibly introduced to novel work contexts. Many of my friends in tech work and thrive in all-remote teams so they are admittedly puzzled by some of the narratives connecting work productivity with a certain kind of presence in a building. Many other friends find it puzzling that anyone might not see the benefit and enlivening in face-to-face embodied interaction with fellow humans. What’s been missed in much of this debate, which has tended to focus on econometric measures of workplace productivity, is the fact that there isn’t a “best” way to work. Working involves a lot of different kinds of people, who will have different ways of thriving and interacting. Some people will struggle with zoom sessions, missing cues, needing embodied intimacy to feel connection. Others will feel overwhelmed, or even repulsed by the insistence on shared space in oversaturated noisy work environments. Which is more productive? Neither. Again, different kinds of people work in different kinds of ways. But it’s not surprising to see a vanguard trying to enforce what is “normal” and “best” for workers.

This preference often follows capital. Teams that are all-remote, can’t fathom how they would cover the additional costs of leasing office space and addiing sufficient infrastructure. Conversely, my own workplace, like many other Universities in the UK has made massive capital investment in running and staffing campus infrastructure, including student housing and food services, and a very paltry one in digital and hybrid environments, most of the latter only when forced to do so under Covid-19 lockdowns. So while tech seems to be, by default, remote friendly, due to underinvestment in infratructure, higher education is the opposite, due to underinvestment in infrastructure. Those who have highlighted the benefits of remote working for wellbeing and improved outcomes for students, especially those with disabilities and neuro-minorities, have been ignored, rebuffed, or even silenced in some cases. It’s a messy situation with many dimensions to it – and I recognise that there won’t be a situation where everyone’s needs are going to be met optimally. So the work here, as I conceive of it, is to find ways to try and find imbalance and work to correct it.

I’ve been observing some symmetrical challenges for young people. On one hand, we see a concerning and large body of evidence showing the negative mental health impacts, exploitation and danger that meet children through their use of digital social environments on social media. This has led to a burgeoning movement among many educators and parents to ban phones (by young people) in schools. There’s a similar, but more intense subculture of which we’re often a part, where parents seek to protect their children by minimising their use of digital devices altogether. As home educators focussed on learning in nature, my partner and I are often part of these conversations. And I often agree, our young people are systematically denied access to nature, social spaces which aren’t saturated by media, or even the basic conditions for a quieter or contemplative experience. But I have also noticed narratives that increasingly concern me here too. Sometimes parents and public figures speak of screens use as a form of “addiction”- this was certainly the case in my own childhood where we were strictly rationed only 30 minutes of computer game playing during weekdays, and weren’t permitted to have video game consoles for much of our early years. I’ve also seen people promulgate  the research regarding negative mental health impacts on young people of playing computer games. As a scholar it’s my job to test assumptions, and as I’ve brought that conviction to this area of concern, I’ve found that children’s engagement with digital devices does not meet the basic thresholds for addictive behaviour. And all of that researching showing the negative effects of video games on children (or before that television)? Mostly just journalists citing pseudo-studies, which source checking reveals are thin and inconclusive. Another way of reading that distress of young people when parents enforce harsh and restrictive rules regarding digital devices is that they’ve found a mode of comfort or accommodation that eases some area of cognitive or emotional difficulty in their lives (which may have even been imperceptible to parents), so their distress is indeed intense, but not because it is rooted in a harmful addition, but because they are being separated from something soothing and helpful in a very overwhelming world.

I’ve been working in campus environments for my whole life – first working in a school district office, then a large telecommunications company and then a series of Universities. In this time of bitterly depressing suburban and urban landscapes, I love the ways that campus working can revive a sense of being in a small town community – waving to people you know on your way to a meeting, popping into the campus cafe for a break, bumping into friends in the hallway and having spontaneous conversations. So it’s probably not surprising that I didn’t realise the significant negative impact this kind of environment was having on my mental and physical health until I was forced into a new work atmosphere under lockdown. The impacts of lockdown didn’t affect us all equally. Some people lived their best lives during lockdown, continuing in already all-digital jobs in comfortable homes benefitting from less logistical distractions and improved delivery services. Others struggled. Many died or experienced significant bereavement. University teaching shifted all online for many Universities for an extended duration – mine was one that re-opened as quickly as possible – but we did have a time during mandatory campus closures. This was incredibly stressful as I needed to rewrite all my teaching, ex nihilo, for a new format, and also found myself teaching on completely new courses given University mandates to take up co-teaching on all modules for “resilience”. As I’ve spoken with a number of staff since then, however, this experience also opened the door of experience to remote working for many of us who had never expereinced or considered it before. For those of us in neuro-minorities, this was a particularly striking enlightenment. We suddenly felt forms of relief we’d never experienced at work before and baselines suddenly shifted.

This dovetailed for me with a process of unmasking and diagnosing being autistic. That sudden gestalt shift, left me seeing things in a new light. I reflected on my past (if tacit) enjoyment of long written exchanges over email, as they offered an opportunity to get my thoughts out clearly in a format that left the other person with time to process what I’d said and react asking for clarification – a rare opportunity in real time meetings, especially those in large groups. I thought back even further to my experiences as a young person in the early days of the internet – I had access to email as a teen, and was administrating the servers that provided email hosting for our entire school district. I enjoyed late exchanges texting messages over IRC and other text-based chats. There was something pure and accessible about being able to sit in a room with no sensory stimuli, read people’s words without being constantly inundated and distracted by a room full of body language, microexpressions, smells, background noise, scraping chair legs, fans running, perfume, body odour, laundry detergent, garlic from that lunch sandwich, etc etc etc. I could focus on the person, and had a level of emotional availability and energy to read and return communication with a clear mind. I relish the ability to think slowly about a tricky policy or scholarly challenge with a colleague over the course of weeks, months or even years without pressure to foreclose and decide. Sometimes my thinking takes unusually long times, because I’m considering a much wider range of angles than other people do and also because I tend to need to synthesise and make a coherent model or plan for moving forward before I can feel comfortable pushing on with action.

After a year under lockdown, returning to campus was excruciating. That’s not because I’d been converted to new forms of leisure that had been formerly unavailable, but because I had become attuned to matters of personal discomfort and stress that had always been present, but which I’d learned and conditioned to mask and conceal. This is corroborated by a long history of personal physical impacts from sustained workplace environmental stress long before 2020. The return was also a departure from a temporarily opened portal on creative thinking about hybrid work environments. All of a sudden, people who had been struggling before under the previous regime with certain defaults, had their chance. Some of my students thrived and developed new levels of entitlement to demand more flexible teaching. Some staff too, had seen the fruits of this, though we were all also admittedly tired and broken down from the trauma and chronic sickness so many of us experienced during the pandemic. So we returned with new forms of ambition and entitlement. I know of many people who have experienced this in many workplaces – this opening of hope, which was quickly dashed when it became clear that executive authority meant to enforce a return to the previous default, and had narratives in hand to defend their choices. The creativity and consultation was over.

The opening of the millennium was full of hope for new creative formats and fora. So much of that has faded, and several years out now, I’m left wondering how we can revive the energy we need to improve the ways we work and live together. I remain steadfast in my conviction that digital spaces are a crucial tool for making our communities more open and available to people who have a personality or bodily experience that deviates from the default – I think this population extends far beyond those who comfortably acknowledge a personal expereince of disability, or would claim to be highly sensitive, to a significant minority of the population, that is, some people in every team in every business, charity, school: customers, stakeholders, and members.

The trouble is, our options for digital exchange have been captured by hostile forces. I was an early adopter in every case, but no longer make use of those platforms which have been infected by algorithms, surveillance, and advertising, e.g. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. This problems is also much deeper – we’ve become committed to values which establish an unbreakable tether between ourselves and those services. We avoid small platforms with niche audiences and communities. We don’t avoid and even refuse to participate in the work of moderation and community maintenance online. It’s easier to complain about facebook’s moderation policy whilst grudgingly continuing to use the platform than it is to shift to an alternative where you need to build up a new, potentially smaller audience, especially if that new platform will also require new forms of work. We require convenient apps with smooth UX and seamless user experinces. And we avoid applications that make demands on us to customise or install tools, engage in learning offline before they are possible. We gravitate towards algorithmic feeds, because it feels easier than having to confront content coming up in our reading that doesn’t match the current vibe – which as a general rule undermines the very idea of moderation and discovery of new and challenging ideas. Convenience and populism meet in the current social media landscape, and regardless of whatever less-unvalorous-option arises (non-federating bluesky anyone?) it will simply continue this lock-in to toxic media engagements which erode our personal values, relationships and citizenship.

My one hope for a future resurgence is in a desire to create spaces for our young people. I’m anxious that many of my peers with the privilege and skill to build these spaces, but who lack the disabilities to grant that work urgency, have opted-out. But maybe there is some opportunity here to create new communities to connect young people, given them agency, community, and safety not through demands that some oligarch-led platform reform its bad behaviours, but by creating new spaces in small communities tied to or seeded from our geographical, familial and relational ones. This would open those communities up to those of us who are hyper-sensory, experience social anxiety, or just don’t work at the pace of the crowd. It would help those people who are able to get along just fine with the norm, by granting exposure to other ways of life that can be spicy and exciting. I think I’m going to put some energy into making this case, and building these environments in the years to come. I hope you’ll join me!

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One thing they don’t teach you in grad school is how to tend your focal attention. This is probably because it’s a non-issue for a majority of researchers, who find themselves regularly able to just sit and focus their attention on a given task at will. But that kind of volitional ability is not available to all of us, nor is that sort of volitional style a universal experience, e.g. focusing for a brief period of time on a task relatively unprepared.

Many researchers have different volitional styles, however. You may find it very hard to focus on something unprepared, or conversely, very hard to maintain focus for a long time. One of the core principles of chemistry is that of a catalyst – a substance that precipitates some chemical process or event, dissolving solids, creating fire, and so on. I’ve found this to be a quite helpful metaphor for the process of neurodivergent scholarship. We’re all finding inspiration from various places, it might be an argument on social media, or with a friend in the pub that enables you to clarify your thinking in the context of defending what you considered to be a reasonable position, or a piece of music that sets your mood in just the right direction to open up the flow of reflection and writing. It can be noise or quiet, positive or negative. The key thing is that we are always relying on something to get us started thinking and writing. It’s likely the case that many people have their catalysts worked out intuitively, and may not be facing blocks on a regular basis, so this is all a tacit process. It has taken me a number of years to realise the important role of catalysts in opening up my thinking and enabling me to conduct constructive reflection and writing. And now that I’ve developed an awareness of these mechanisms, how they loop into mood, volition, and thinking in the context of my unqiue personality, I’ve gained an awareness of how they sacred and precious they are. By extension, I’ve learned how a key element of developing your toolkit as a neurodivergent researcher involves minding and tending these catalysts.

Sometimes I’ll find that a piece of music just opens up some really particular thinking and before I realise it I’m in that wonderful flow of writing. Now I write down the name of the piece and include a streaming link so I can access it again in the future. Sometimes the setting of writing is important, so I’ve thought a lot about designing an environment that works for me. But crucially, there isn’t just one kind of writing, so I’ve catalogued a variety of places each with a different sensory profile, in light of the particular kinds of thinking they open up. There can be temporal catalysts – specific times of day for specific kinds of activity, even situated within specific seasons.

So how are you minding your motivation? What sorts of catalysts work out for you in particular kinds of thinking and writing?

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If, like me, you’ve been following the development of generative AI and large language models as a tool for scholarship and productive working, you’ll likely be interested in the development of NotebookLM. Google has a version of this kind of tool, which ingests a PDF file and outputs a short podcast style audio discussion of the book which provides an enjoyable summary. It’s a pretty efficicent way to blast through a pile of journal article PDFs and sift for those that might bear closer reading. However, many readers will be cynical about google’s inability to provide a public good, so will be even more glad to hear that there’s an open source alternative, Open NotebookLM. Itsfoss.com has a pretty good writeup on the tool including instructions on how you can run it yourself entirely locally to your own PC. Worth noting that Open NotebookLM has a max 100,000 characters limit, and the audio quality isn’t quite up to google NotebookLM yet. But it’s a great move in the right direction.

Also, after you’ve done a few listens to podcasts from NotebookLM, you might benefit from some comic relief:

If you really want to have fun, you can even add faces for your podcast “hosts”

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One of the hardest things about being an unmasking (or not) neurodivergent academic is the frequent estrangement from your previous selves. Until recently, I was constantly tripping over and ruminating on actions I’d made or thoughts I’d expressed in previous eras of life with some sense of shame or embarrasment, even following a reflex to conceal or suppress those thoughts.There are forms of protestant Christianity and models of self-improvement which I’d been exposed to which enshrine these forms of self-harm as good practice. I was thinking about the ways that this impairs scholarship this morning, reading an old post by Cory Doctorow. Cory is a bit older than me, but we emerged in similar radical techno-cultures, so I’m always learning and feeling edified by his writing. In my reading today, Cory talks about the value of bottom-up thinking. Reflecting in the post on blogging, he says:

Clay Shirky has described the process of reading blogs as the inverse of reading traditional sources of news and opinion. In the traditional world, an editor selects (from among pitches from writers for things that might interest a readership), and then publishes (the selected pieces).

But for blog readers, the process is inverted: bloggers publish (everything that seems significant to them) and then readers select (which of those publications are worthy of their interests). There are advantages and disadvantages to both select-then-publish and publish-then-select, and while the latter may require more of the unrewarding work of deciding to ignore uninteresting writing, it also has more of the rewarding delight of discovering something that’s both totally unexpected and utterly wonderful.

That’s not the only inversion that blogging entails. When it comes to a (my) blogging method for writing longer, more synthetic work, the traditional relationship between research and writing is reversed. Traditionally, a writer identifies a subject of interest and researches it, then writes about it. In the (my) blogging method, the writer blogs about everything that seems interesting, until a subject gels out of all of those disparate, short pieces.

Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research — it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet. It’s a way to discover what your future books and essays and stories and speeches will be about.

As you’ll have seen from the ways that this blog serves as a repository of all my public writing over the course of more than a decade, this is the same approach I tend to take. Write and communicate the fragmentary thoughts, and work to identify the coherence of them, in a bottom-up way, until you identify the incohate intuition which drove them in the first place in a way that you can communicate to others.

What struck me about Cory’s piece, however, was his emphasis on the importance of memory. Referencing Vannevar Bush’s concept of the “memex”, he goes on to suggest:

it’s hard to write long and prolifically without cringing at the memory of some of your own work. After all, if the point of writing is to clarify your thinking and improve your understanding, then, by definition, your older work will be more muddled.

Cringing at your own memories does no one any good. On the other hand, systematically reviewing your older work to find the patterns in where you got it wrong (and right!) is hugely beneficial — it’s a useful process of introspection that makes it easier to spot and avoid your own pitfalls.

For more than a decade, I’ve revisited “this day in history” from my own blogging archive, looking back one year, five years, ten years (and then, eventually, 15 years and 20 years). Every day, I roll back my blog archives to this day in years gone past, pull out the most interesting headlines and publish a quick blog post linking back to them.

This structured, daily work of looking back on where I’ve been is more valuable to helping me think about where I’m going than I can say.

It struck me this morning, that this is a crucial part of the kind of messy process I undertake, but my implementation of it has often been impacted by forms of shame, driven by a span of life lived un-conventionally. As a neurodivergent youngster, I was trained by the adults around me to conceal my unconventionality, unless it could be packaged and shared with those around me in ways that would seem unthreatening and graspeable. And the “stranger” patterns or results of thinking were best concealed, masked for the sake of personal safety. Masking generates a pattern of self-suppression and a linked experience of shame and rumination on the dangers of past actions. Review becomes a space for reinscribing our masks, testing the fit, and ensuring its efficient operation.

What Cory points out here (at least for me!) is the importance of self-acceptance and love in the context of a bottom-up scholarly life which requires regular review and reflection. As I’ve pursued a process of unmasking, and what Devon Price reflects on as “radical visibility” over the past half decade, I can recall a specific moment of where I passed a threshold of self-understanding and acceptance and was able to begin looking back on my former self with acceptance and love rather than shame. What’s become increasingly clear to me is that until you’re able to pass that threshold (and let’s accept that it is surely a recursive process I will need to repeat with increasing levels of honest self-awareness), you are estranged from these processes of memory which are a crucial endpoint of scholarly reflection in the mode that I’ve come to practice. If you celebrate the bottom-up process like I do, your practice will nonetheless be truncated until you are able to methodically look back on past reflections with the ability to recognise their imcompleteness whilst also celebrating the shards of insight that they may tacitly contain.

Do also check out Cory’s post which inspired mine this morning, “The Memex Method” here at pluralistic.net.

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photo of the River Severn flooded in 1940, a car is being dragged by several men with a rope out of the river

Yesterday there was torrential rain, lashing Wales for a few hours and creating widespread flooding which shut down roads and trains. This morning, I walked past the River Severn on my way in to run a seminar at the University of Sustainable Development. The Severn is one of the largest and most lively rivers in the UK, but the river this morning was far beyond its usual path, a gushing, brown expanse carrying rain and runoff. It was a striking juxtaposition, creaking civil infrastructure neglected in part through decades of climate change denial, and a loud and lively admission of climate change intensified storms, likely a weather pattern which landed in the United States last week as a series of devastating hurricanes.

I’ve been studying the ways that we can communicate across species barriers, and the challenges to our conceptions of “normal” communication which result from these encounters. Over the summer I taught a course at a theological college, and we engaged in a contemplative ecology walk one rainy afternoon. That walk took us past the River Mersey in Manchester. As I pressed students to engage with other creatures around us in an act of contemplative communication, we paused to wonder about what sort of spiritual beings the different creatures around us might be and how they might be speaking to us. Rivers commmunicate through motion: pace, push, and flow. Like trees (and the subject of a workshop some weeks before), they communicate slowly, expressing conviction and presence by moving land and shifting their path in subtle ways, gently carrying other little beings of soil and rock with them to new homes. Communication through motion is not inaccessible or unknown to humans, though our everyday lives do sometimes deny us joyful motion, scholars have plumbed the communicative potential of dance, and I think we would do well to observe symmetries in the art of intention motion by human communicators and nonverbal nonhumans.

As we paused on our walk at the Mersey, I observed to the group that the sides of the river had been filled with cement in a form of cheap and efficient flood protection. This river could not move. It had been rendered mute and inert, in what could be seen as an act of cruelty and disdain for the intended ecological presence of a river. As the students and I reflected on the Mersey and the forms of presence it might be offering to us, and we moved beyond our initial appreciations for its benefits for anthropos, in the therapeautic conveyance of pace, strength, patience, forebearance. It was impossible to ignore the ways that the river brought life to the whole biotic community of the city. Yet at the same time, when I asked the group to push past our own lifeworlds and to try and imaginatively inhabit that of the river and consider what sort of presence it had to itself, it was hard to ignore the suffering it must endure as a creature, full of potential expressiveness, yet lashed to an artificial course, still generously holding down (for the sake of the health of other creatures) toxic runoff from centuries of mining and industry sedimented under its body. I spend some of my contemplation in quiet solidarity with those other traumatised creatures, including humans, who have had their communication taken from them.

This morning many news outlets decried the destructive potential of our waterways in Wales. I do not deny the tragic consequences of short-sighted development schemes and climate denialism placing houses close to waterways with little to protect them. And I note the ways that the victims of suffering in recent weeks are overwhelmingly minoritised and poor. However, I do not lament the speech of the river Severn this morning. At the same time that it is giving us life and protecting us from self-inflicted harms, it is speaking to us – screaming it the loudest possible voice (I wonder, is it rage? grief? fear?) – can we find our way back to the old ways of listening to the land and paying heed to its wisdom?

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I’ve been thinking a lot about multi-species interactions, as I’m starting up a new research project this autumn under the auspices of the Birmingham Multispecies Forum and this kind of work has been part of my core scholarly research for well over a decade now. Over sabbatical I’ve been doing some speculative thinking in this area, aided in part by visual ethnographic methodologies (on which I’ll share more in the months to come). We also became the keepers for a Welsh sheepdog, “Scout” just after Christmas, so I’ve been thinking a lot with Scout about how we need to change our family patterns to suit him and vice versa.

There are a lot of opinions on dog training, I mean A LOT. And I’ve not found many people who hold those opinions lightly, so it has been interesting sifting through the different kinds of dog whispering and the underpinning convictions which seem to drive them. There are some matters of bad science which has been cleared away in the scientific sphere, but not in the popular imaginary, so for example, it’s now widely understood among canine biologists that dogs (and wolves for that matter) don’t work around hierarchical “alpha male” led packs. There are also some serious questions about whether behaviourist models, seen in the switch away from dominance-led top-down and discipline heavy training models towards positive training models which take into account the sensntivity, intelligence and alterity of dogs. Justyna Wlodarczyk helpfully situates this within the “animal turn” led in large part by Donna Haraway about 20 years ago. In an article titled “Be More Dog: The human–canine relationship in contemporary dog-training methodologies” they highlight this broader trend in state of the art training methodologies.

I’ve had this all in mind as I work with Scout on various things. He’s only two years old and his former human companions really didn’t do much in the way of training, leaving him unaware of how to manage a lead, afraid of rivers or even water puddles (for lack of previous exposure!), unsafe  in managing roads and so on. Of course, all the advice we’ve gotten since then has focussed on the need to heavily train him for right behaviours. I’ve unwittingly found myself following this advice on several occasions only to notice Scout uninterested, confused by, or resistant to training. These matters are a bit more acute in urban environments, such as ours, as dogs can be at risk from harm from other humans and dogs, in many cases due to (at least the narratives go) a lack of training.

One area which is a bit more ambiguous is food. Being a sheepdog, Scout’s biology is oriented towards hypersensitivity, breeders in previous centuries attributed this to being able to sense risk to the flock and suitably raise alarm and protect sheep from predators. In the city, this leads to a lot of sensory overwhelm, something I can relate to on many levels. Lucky for Scout, our house is sensorially very quiet. There are still, however, areas where his anxiety can show, especially around mealtimes. Again, stress surfacing in experiences of food and eating is pretty common stuff for neurodivergent humans, so I’ve had this in the back of my mind as we work together to find a routine that works for him. But it has been difficult, with Scout often choosing not to eat, or only eating a small portion of the food we’ve offered. He’s uninterested in most kinds of dog treats, and not highly motivated by food in general.

The dog trainers on instagram, always happy to dispense their advice had several helpful tips. One frequently occuring set of rules was driven by the behaviouralist paradigm: set out his food at a specific time and remove it shortly after. The thinking goes, if we provide something on a predictable routine and then make it clear that the only way he’ll get food is by following those rules, he’ll fall in line. Again, it’s interesting to note how many parallels there are here to inpatient mental health care in previous decades, with food and routine used as part of behaviouralist routines.

This really hasn’t worked for Scout, and we’re still trying to get a sense of what’s at the bottom of things. Some nights he’ll gobble up a whole dish with happy gusto, and others, he’ll sniff at things and retreat. We’ve tried to add certain bursts of activity to get his metabolism moving, we’ve tried adding variety and supplementing his food with other interesting extras (whilst trying to avoid drifting into a complete lack of nutritional benefit). We’ve gone with enrichment, making eating into an activity. We’ve tried different kinds of food mix and ingredients. And we’re still trying, not quite sure what is driving his varying interest. We’ve also wondered on some occasions whether it’s presence he likes – our sons are certain that Scout needs to sit with another human while they eat, having a mealtime companion. And I’m not sure they’re wrong about this, though the pattern still hasn’t held with some testing of this theory as well.

The overarching point I’m driving towards is that I’ve begun to see food with Scout not as another aspect of training, but as a process of co-creating rituals. We’re attempting to get a sense of the proper order, activities, sensorium, and so on, fusing our ritual needs with his. And this is a long process, which doesn’t just involve discerning his “nature” but also a subtle and gradual shift in our alterities towards one another. There’s also a sense of ritual meaning, thinking about how we can think with him and vice versa about the higher aspects of ritual, a sense of thankgiving, awareness of our prilege and the web of interconnectedness and forms of benevolence that bring food to us, and finding ways to do this which aren’t about hierarchies or control, but about shared expressions of gratitude in a variety of modes and languages. I’ve been left wondering how much this process of co-creating rituals might be taken as a template for thinking about improving our relationships with a whole variety of creatures, not just mammals or even animals. More on this as my speculative experiments continue!

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In my previous post a few days ago, I mention a range of emerging research in moral injury. I think this field may be quite important for expanding the field of reflection in theological ethics, but I’ll be getting to that a bit later. I wanted to dwell for a moment on a phenomena that I’ve observed in the literature which points at a hazard in interdisciplinary research that is well worth our attention, particularly for scholars who are working across humanities / science / social-science boundaries like I often am.

In working with the category of moral injury, and also more broadly around trauma studies, I’ve noted a desire by activists (with whom I have much common cause) to make the condition as broadly applicable as possible. You can see this in the claims that all persons living in our societies experience moral injury and trauma as a result of our enclosure and oppression in neoliberal societies. This is a difficult challenge for humanists interfacing with trauma studies, particularly if your scholarly reflection doesn’t touch down on personal experience with the condition you’re probing and appropriating for wider reflection. And indeed, I’ve seen this work out in much broader engagement with scientific concepts, around ecological concepts, biological theories of evolution, cognition in other-than-human animals and plants.

There is something about these concepts which can be uniquely compelling – they draw us in and provide a catalyst for thinking and reflecting on a context where we want to sharpen the focus of our audiences. In some ways, it might be said that they can serve as generative metaphors, opening up new kinds of expansive or transitive thought. But the conceptual origins of generative metaphors can be various – a concept can be porous, open ended or expansive from the start. Some concepts arise from material conditions which are quite specific and can be defined forensically. Of course, some of these forensic definitions can themselves carry a level of construction and fiction, to be fair. This all relates to the different possible characteristics of a source domain, and the ways that we interface with those different characteristics. I’ve noticed a particular appetite in writing about forms of crisis and mental distress (perhaps arising from the intellectual structures of psychoanalysis) to work expansively with categories of distress and situate them in all of our everyday lives. I’ve also noticed sharply negative reactions from those persons who experience these conditions in the sharp form as a form of oppression. This can be seen in the push-back against more expansive understandings of autism and neurodivergence, shown in the expression of fears that mainstreaming concepts will lead to an erosion of social and biomedical support for those who have meaningful high support needs. In a similar way, I’ve seen fears that appropriation of concepts of trauma may lead to an erosion of understanding trauma as an exceptional situation. Do we all experience trauma? I don’t really think so, actually. We all experience hardship, perhaps even some levels of suffering, but to use the word “trauma” to define these situations which already have other terms (which perhaps we have become desensitised to) does indeed risk, I think, a diversion of attention. Speaking about forms of trauma which are disabling can suddenly provide difficult when the background context of conversation assumes that everyone is experiencing and attempting to surmount these matters.

There’s a risk that reacting negatively to these forms of generalisation and appropriation of the metaphors of trauma can work in service to forms of positivism. In a desire to bring a rejoinder, we can reach for tools which offer specificity, e.g. DSM diagnostic pathways, and other features of contemporary experimental psychological research. But is this the right kind of specificity? And is reaching in this way, e.g. as a valorous gatekeeper, the right way to do this? I don’t think so. There are forms of specification which can draw us deeper into personalising our accounts of suffering and oppression, though these are hard to do as they require levels of disclosure and communication. There are also ways of doing this work which adds further texture to our accounts of the everyday. It may also be important for us to work with more highly specified theodicies – avoiding lazy characterisations of evil which use broad brushstrokes or work in overly encompassing ways. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t use the category of evil, but that we need to really unpack what we mean and how that applies. It’s also possible that, looking to the broader interdisciplinary working category, that some attention to forms of source domain for our metaphors may reveal that there are concepts which commend and even advertise themseves as supportive of broader appropriation, which might serve the cause of justice by being more widely deployed. Similarly, it’s equally possible that we may need to proceed more sensitively and carefully in our use of concepts. This is especially difficult, I think, for scholars who are personally experiencing oppression or suffering for the first time as this initial experience can carry such sharpness (given the lack of background to provide a sense of bas relief) that we can lose the ability to determine whether our appropriations are inappropriate. For this, I think, we need to rely on more experienced hands – and perhaps not just human ones.

 

If we approach something like moral injury or complex PTSD less in terms of a forensically defined diagnostic pathway, and more as a metaphor which can be more freely appropriated, we can sometimes lose the ability to define thresholds of experience, that is, when a person experiences the phenomenon without the persistent experience of bodily harm or a certain level of oppression which proves disabling

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About 20 years ago, psychologists working with returning war veterans noticed that many solidiers carried the symptoms of PTSD, but lacked the kinds of specific acute episodes of embodied trauma and injury that serve as catalysts for this condition. The triggering event which they uncovered was that those soldiers had experienced a situation in which they were instructed to violate their own moral code, to prosecute torture, to engage in what they knew to be immoral, or at best morally ambiguous killing of civilians, and so forth. As Willie Jennings suggests,

The idea of moral injury powerfully articulated in the writings of psychotherapist Jonathan Shay has emerged in recent years as a crucial hermeneutic for understanding the tortured memory work of war veterans, trying to come to terms with having transgressed their moral beliefs. How does one negotiate life after transgressing, not simply a moral principle, but the coherence of a moral universe? Moral injury occurs when the fabric that holds moral agency and the self together are torn asunder. (From War Bodies: Remembering Bodies in a Time of War, in Arel and Rambo (eds.), Post-Traumatic Public Theology, p. 23-24)

This has been written up and developed into clinical diagnostic categories and pathways for treatment in subsequent research (see for example Litz et al, 2009). It has also been the case that researchers have begun to find applicability for this concept in other “battlefields,” identifying instances of moral injury as in teaching professions, where teachers are given orders to practice substandard, or even harmful forms of pedagogy, and in the health services, when doctors and nurses are told they must triage or mitigate care in ways that they know will cause harm to individuals who are suffering. This hit quite close to home when I discovered that my own colleagues have studied instances of moral injury as it has occurred in British Universities as a result of neo-liberal pressures to raise revenue and keep xenophobic government ministers happy.

I have experienced this kind of situation where you find yourself “under orders” which generate levels of uncomfortable, what might even be considered oppressive levels of cognitive dissonance. And it’s worth noting that these forms of hierarchy can be quite covert, not looking on the outside like the command and control structures that we might expect, veering towards more subtly coercive forms of control. In some of these cases, many of us in contemporary Universities have felt a burden to express care in the context of professional practice and found that it is forbidden, even pathologised and shamed. From converstions with peers, this experience is not ubiquitous, but is nonetheless widely experienced among practitioners in education, health care, social work and military service. This is likely why professionals are leaving those fields in record numbers.

Though this phenomenon is experienced widely, it does not always pass the threshold of psychological burden into the experience of trauma. There are some persons who experience the kind of cognitive dissonance I am describing here who can set it to one side and carry on, feeling forms of discomfort which do not rise to embodied experiences of trauma. But there are also impacts that can be particularly sharp for some people, reaching levels which are disabling.

This phenomenon was observed much earler as well by a research team led by the philosopher and anthropologist Gregory Bateson. In what they called the “double bind” phenomena, Bateson and his collaborators observed that people may experience trama when they are subjected to conflicting orders, particularly when the mismatch between them is not presented as straight-forward disagreement but may be a sort of control without obvious coercion (outlined in Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind, pp. 271-278). It’s important to note that Bateson’s work was in relation to attempts to define and understand schizophrenia, wihch in the 1950-60s when he was conducting this research, had a much wider field of concern – encompassing a wide range of what might now be considered mental health disorders or other forms of neurodivergence. Contemporary experimental psychology can work towards diagnostic criteria that are almost incomprehensibly nuanced, with sub-genres of sub-genres seemingly distinguished on the basis of arbitrary traits. In contrast, research before the DSM could sometimes be almost incomprehensibly comprehensive. Bateson goes so far as to suggest that this research into the underlying epistemological “tangles” which represent the “double bind” is “transcontextual,” pertaining to a “genus of syndromes which are not conventionally regarded as pathological” (272). That is, something very much resembling moral injury lies at the heart of schizophrenia, what he calls elsewhere “the mental description of schizophrenia” (Bateson, 1977, Afterword).

The reason that I highlight this wider context from earlier research is that I’m particularly mindful of the ways that in the 1960s, the diagnostic category of schizophrenia included autism, which was then considered a form of male juvenile schizophrenia. While I’d sharply disagree (and most experimental psychologists would likely as well) with Bateson’s underlying conclusions about habits, behaviour and rigidity, there are many ways that we can redefine his premises whilst holding on to their descriptive power. What I’m getting at here, which I’ve already hinted at above, is my sense that Bateson’s team had grasped an insight which more recent moral injury research is only just starting to return to, that the “double bind” can be uniquely oppressive for neurodivergent persons, particularly with forms of autistic cognition that are sometimes described as monotropic, more pathologically as “rigid” in the DSM, or more recently (and astutely) as being oriented around cognitive inertia and flow states.

There are some caveats I need to apply here briefly before explaining why I think autistic cognition might tie into a higher level of vulnerability towards moral injury trauma. It is important to note that the tendency towards ritual and routine (which has been ruthlessly pathologised by psychiatry), e.g. rule generation and rule following, can be seen as a secondary condition, an attempt to create order in chaos and soothing for persons experiencing trauma. Are untraumatised autistic individuals as likely to pursue rules with rigidity? In a similar way, as I’ve noted elsewhere, the experience of being constantly misunderstood (e.g. the double empathy problem) can lead to a person being more methodical as a necessity in pursing communication with different others. So we can see ways that rigidity and rule-orientations are a necessary form of trying to maintain relationship and connection with others in a world which is semiotically and sensorially traumatising in complex ways and where other forms of thought and communication are persistently privileged.

But with those caveats established, I do nonetheless think that there are ways that autistic cognition, at least in my own experience, does revolve around being value oriented in sometimes more persistent ways. This has been noted in research which attributes higher than average orientations towards justice and lower-than average rates of crime among autistic individuals. And there are anecdotal versions of this, which have been relentlessly pathologised in contemporary television and film with characters “sticking to their guns” to unusual levels. The point is that this basic orientation may render us more succeptible to the forms of trauma which are latent in moral injury. It’s interesting to me to note that Bateson and his team seems to have picked this up quite early in their research, which hasn’t really been returned to in psychology of moral injury.

 

Works Mentioned:

Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner, 1994)

Brett T. Litz, Nathan Stein, Eileen Delaney, Leslie Lebowitz, William P. Nash, Caroline Silva, and Shira Maguen (2009) “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy,” Clinical Psychology Review, vol. 29, no. 8, 695–706.

Matthew R Broome, Jamila Rodrigues, Rosa Ritunnano and Clara Humpston, “Psychiatry as a vocation: Moral injury, COVID-19, and the phenomenology of clinical practice” in Clinical Ethics (2023): doi: 10.1177/14777509231208361.

Say it your way! But do it perfectly. And everyone needs to understand what you’ve said.

One of the joys of being an academic is working with a wide range of people as a writing coach, from undergraduates and PhD candidates I supervise to peers and co-authors, much of my work involves finding ways to communicate effectively and helping others to learn to do it as well.

As my opening line suggests, however, this idea of communicating as a form of authentic personal expression can often clash with the demand to ensure that your communication is perspicuous, that is, easy for others to understand. The more I learn and think about human neuro- and cultural diversity the more acute this challenge seems to me. The most obvious form of inability in human communication can be seen in those contexts where we can communicate perfectly well in one human language, but simply cannot understand another. We talk about fluency when it comes to language. But fluency also exists in forms of dialects, albeit more covertly. Especially since moving to the UK, where there is a wider range of English dialects which are aligned with different levels of social class and attainment, I’ve realised that communication in a common language can be fraught and complicated with unintentional or unanticipated forms of misunderstanding.

Does good writing transcend particularities and reach for a “canonical” or standard form of a language? Much of the infrastructure of the modern University suggests this is the case (see my post on marking, for example). But generic communication prevents us from achieving some levels of texture and nuance in communication, this is why forms of vernacular speech can communicate so much more, and many poets have privileged vernacular as a source of truth in particularity. It’s also the case that the confidence we can gain from working within so-called standards, is undeserved, simply forcing others to conceal their lack of understanding and far too often “canon” is simply another word for exclusive privilege. One can be multi-lingual, as an alternative, working with a variety of forms of language, and even seeking to learn the languages of the other persons you communicate with.

I’ve been toying with this myself lately, noticing forms of self-policing that are part of my writing process. I was taught to be cautious with pronouns, one might suggest. Lecturers drew red lines through contractions, informal, and colloquial forms of speech. I remember one paper I received back as an undergraduate with “coll.” written in the margins throughout. This is where I first learned the word colloquial. I’ve been glad to learn to be more reflective and intentional in my use of gendered pronouns (see the fantastic piece by my colleague Nick Adams in SJT on this subject for more!). I learned to make my use of metaphors more forensic, closed down, and available for easy interpretation for readers. And, when writing theologically, I was taught to for chains of citation to pristinate and authorise my insights. I’ve begun to contest these moves deliberately in my writing. You’ll notice that my journal articles have contractions strewn throughout. I’ve begun writing articles with only light use of citation (in the case where an idea from a colleague does require responsible attribution). Some of my writing takes the form of creative fiction or poetry, and not as a joke, but situated as serious scholarly reflection albeit in an unexpected genre. But these can’t be published in scholarly journals, so I publish them as preprints and blog posts.

It’s interesting to think about what this experimental turn into deliberately vernacular speech means for our work as writing coaches. We want our students to be taken seriously, and perhaps this requires deference to “standard English” but I’m becoming increasingly concerned that doing this task well, especially in the context of the assessment of student writing, is an extension of  toxic regimes of behaviour modification and cultural erasure. I’ll correct someone’s grammar if I can tell they’re trying to achieve a certain genre and it’s clear to both of us what the rules are in that genre. But if someone wants to step outside the conventional genre? I’ll meet you there.