Posted on
by

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!

Posted on
by

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?

Posted on
by

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”

Posted on
by

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.

Posted on
by
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?

Posted on
by

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!

Posted on
by

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

Posted on
by

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.

Posted on
by

I’ve been thinking lately about how to explain how my body works, particularly in that there are some people in my life who find it hard to understand but really do want to. This is a classic conundrum of being neurodivergent – you are different, and (potentially) trained from birth to conceal those forms of difference even from yourself. So there’s a long and iterative process of unfolding self-knowledge that needs to precede those kinds of explanations, but once you’ve finally gotten to the point where you are starting to form green shoots of of understanding, the next challenge is to find metaphors, stories and shared experiences you can leverage to bridge the gap of difference with others who are curious. And then perhaps the next challenge lurking is weathering the fatigue that those friends start to quickly experience. Our societies are designed around homogeneity, such that difference must be made accessible for consumption, even by allies. Compounding this challenge is the likely fact that those allies (and you as well) aren’t readily aware of your limitations in this area, so there are forms of humility to grapple with. This all takes a lot of emotional work and often comes as a surprise. I’ve learned to give people space for surprise and retreat so they can process (a) how weird I am to them and (b) how exhausting it is for them to parse all this out and (c) how unexpectedly humbling it is to discover you are limited in your ability to express compassion for others. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I have a metaphor which I think goes a long way towards explaining inertia and stress / overload around information. Here goes:

A picture of a tuning fork against a transparent background. It's a piece of forged metal with two thick tines and a single round knob for holding
Zephyris at the English-language Wikipedia

Have you ever played with a tuning fork before? As a musician, I’ve used them many times before. It’s a heavy piece of metal, shaped like a two-pronged fork. If you hold the handle and hit something it will vibrate at a particular pitch, which you can use for a starting tone when singing or tuning an instrument. There are a lot of fun youtube videos you can watch demonstrating how they will make other objects sympathetically vibrate as the sound waves they produce make the air around them vibrate.

If you gently strike the tuning fork on a hard surface it will ring quietly, but becase it is machined quite precisely and is made from substantial  quantaties of metal, it will continue to resonante for quite a long time. If you hit it on something a second time before it has finished resonating, the volume will increase, and you can keep doing this repeatedly until the sound is quite loud.

I’m a human tuning fork in a few ways. I’m constantly vibrating from taking in information, including from my senses. When I’ve had a particularly full or overstimulating day, it can feel like the resonance just won’t stop and my partner and I often joke with each other using this language. When I take in information, just like a tuning fork that keeps humming long after you’ve struck it, I can’t turn my mental resonance off. There are a variety of neurobiological theories (some of them full of bias and discrimination) about why this is the case, but what I’ve found is that I need to process information – all of the information – or it just won’t go away. When I was young, I’d lay awake at night, sometimes for hours processing all the facial expressions, conversations (including those I’d unwittingly overheard that weren’t intended for me), and things I’d observed about nature and the human world. It’s possible I could have found medication that helped me to sleep better, but I’m pretty certain that I’d wake up the next day and pick right up where I left off so there’d be a debt to pay. All the tasks, details, projects, and undigested information from books, social media etc etc etc are always just queued up waiting for a turn until I can get through the list.

So the best thing for me is to either (a) find a way to process everything or (b) limit the amount of information I take in.

Let’s talk about processing first. Since I’ve been working in community with neurodivergent friends, colleagues and family, I’ve learned to appreciate that there are different personal cultures around information processing. Some people, like my partner, are internal processors. The main thing that personality needs (I think) is a quiet place, some time, and space to themselves to work through it all. I do this a bit, but it’s not my primary mental economy. I’m an external processor, e.g. I process information in conversation with other people and need an extrinsic catalyst – the push and pull of conversation, confusion, and query from another being – to move things along. It’s not merely helpful, it’s necessary. If I can’t talk to someone about things, my processing can sometimes slow or freeze completely. One of the great joys of being autistic is what’s often colloquially called info-dumping. For those of us who do it, especially in conversation with other autistic body-minds, it can be an amazing way to parse through a lot very quickly. This is where someone tells you everything they know about a particular personal passion (I’m not really a fan of “special interest” which is more than a little patronising), perhaps as a monologue, for quite a while. [Quick aside: have you noticed the length of my blog posts and emails? Why do so many people write and communicate with unnecessary brevity?]

I’ve observed that there are different levels of externality and processing independence and this can express quite differently for different flavours of neurodivergence and autism. Some people need and thrive on interruptions, others need a more or less silent captive audience for quite a span of time. I’m somewhere in the middle. Sometimes I really just need to get something out, without a lot of interruptions, so I can piece together all the parts in a coherent narrative and then I’m really keen to have a back-and-forth parsing out of what I’ve just put together.

One of the great gifts of being a lecturer is that people often want to listen to me process things in an uninterrupted way for a long time and then parse out the details. It’s delightful. I do try to keep things interesting entertaining so I don’t lose that audience. And since I’ve spent so much time thinking about the different ways that humans can tend to process information, I’m actually pretty good at accommodating difference here. So what’s your processing style? I’d love to hear a bit more! How do you prefer to balance internal / external forms of rumination? And what kind of flow do you prefer? Uninterrupted? Rapid back and forth?

I’ve also been learning about some helpful ways to limit, control or curate inbound information, especially for those cases when I don’t have the option to process in a holistic and adapted way. But to be completely honest, I’ve encountered some pretty fierce resistance and hostility from the modern workplace in this area. Many middle managers and designers of infrastructure are accustomed to controlling the amount of information that goes out, the pathways it uses to get to us, and the rhythm and pace it travels at. When someone like me comes along and says, “hey, could we do emailing a bit differently?” or “all those alerts and social features that you find it so easy to ignore are driving me nuts, I’d really love it if we could have more options for software with different interface styles” or “can we have a search feature on that with ulfiltered results?” the reactions that come back can be dismissive, patronising, even snarling. And then I’ve got to process all the information from those negative and controlling encounters. This is also one of those situations where allies are desparate to hear about these things, but then when we hit resistance and they see how intractably designed our social infrastructure is against the kinds of adjustments I’m talking about here, I can tell that their energy gets zapped pretty fast and the conversation veers into exhausted neurotypical “pragmatism”. I get it, but it’s not a great scene overall, especially as ed-tech venture capital driven development cycles have changed the way we use information in ways that are totally toxic to my mental health.

It’s important to emphasise as well that I often don’t necessarily want to cut off the flow of information. As I frequently tell others, I am a hedonist for information. I delight in the riding the torrent as long as I can before I’m shut down and nonfunctioning, which is not to say this is the only possible outcome of such surfing. The experience of being in a state of saturation can be euphoric and healthy for me, as long as I have some control over how thigns are working in practice. So when people assume that the way to respond to this disability for me is to (out of paternalistic kindness) simply shut me out of things, that’s far more miserable, even terrifying. For me it’s about fine tuning, especially flow, rhythm, and aspect of the information that’s coming at me. If I’m allowed to fine-tune things, which I can more or less do independently (including writing my own software and scripts), everything can be lovely.

Thinking about my tuning-fork-body, there are a few things which are just kryptonite for me, in ways that often puzzle friends & family. One of them is reminders. I realise it’s totally normal to remind someone about something you fear they’ve forgotten. But I don’t really have the luxury of forgetting as often as I’d like. It’s all there sitting in my mental buffers whether I like it or not, and if it seems like I’ve forgotten something, it’s really that I’ve been shut down by circumstances or there’s a bunch of other more prioritised stuff ahead of that one thing. And let me tell you, when you have persistence of information in this way, the discomfort of being unable to attend to things can get pretty extreme. So when someone comes along and drops what they think is a gentle reminder, actually you’ve just hit the already resonating tuning fork against the wall again and it gets a bit louder than it was before for me. And then the next reminder makes it even louder. The experience of having something amplified like that can be pretty stressful, even panic inducing at some levels of noise.

So if it seems like I haven’t gotten to something, even though it might seem completely counter-intuitive, it’s better to assume I haven’t forgotten. Instead, do a quick mental inventory before asking me about it, ask yourself: if Jeremy hasn’t gotten to that thing, am I prepared to set aside what I’m doing and devote some energy towards helping him or even independently finding some help for him? If your honest answer is “no” much better to hold off on the reminder. Please. No really, I’m begging you. I hold no resentment for people who don’t have the time or energy to help me out and am actually really grateful when someone can do that kind of quick check and openly acknowledge that they can’t help me because they’re already at full speed on their own stuff (and BTW it’s not always so great when people do the “quick check” but then fail to share).

But if, after an honest self-assessment, you conclude you’ve got some bandwidth, then I’d love to have a conversation that starts like this, “I’ve noticed you haven’t gotten around to X. Would it be helpful to talk through the barriers that are preventing you from getting to that thing? How can I help?” I have a few beautiful humans in my life who do this, and it is amazing when it happens.

Another kryptionite bar for me can be out-of-control information flows. This manifests in a few ways, but with particular sharpness in meetings and conferences. Usually meetings are chock full of information. Most people just ignore 90% of what’s discussed and I’m really delighted they can compartmentalise and forget like that. But I can’t. My brain is running down various trails exploring possible avenues to manage each thing we discuss. And I’m processing all the facial (micro-)expressions in the room, body language, side-conversations, the content of the slides, something I discussed with another person who is in the room 5 weeks ago which relates to the topic at hand, etc etc. It’s a lot. But if it’s just some manager doing an info-dump at the front for an hour, that’s uncomfortable but not traumatic. I can manage the discomfort and hold on for the ride and sift through it by myself afterwards. And let me pause to say, if this is the situation we’re facing, it’s a relief to be told straight-forwardly by the presenter that there isn’t going to be time for discussion.

The worst thing is when we have break-out groups or short full-group discussion after each agenda item. Here’s how this works for me: let’s say we’re 30 minutes into the meeting, and then we set aside 5 minutes to talk in a group and generate key points to bring back in a plenary style. Because I need to process externally, it’s going to be desperately difficult for me to get through piecing together all my thoughts about the topic we’ve just been handed. I’m still processing all the emotions in the room, the five items on the outline that came before the thing we’re supposed to be talking about, and I’m aware that if I talk too long, some neurotypical non-allies will start mobiling forms of social shaming to put me in my place – talking about the awkwardness of “overshare” or how I’m “mansplaining” or just assuming that I’m not aware that it’s rude to take up all the talking time. I’m aware. But you’ve just told me I need to participate and share, and this is literally the only way I can do that. I’m also mindful that simply sitting silently can be taken as rudeness too. So that break-out group whacks that tuning fork a few times and then tells me I’ve got to be suddenly silent and shift to thinking about something else. But I can’t stop that vibration and I find that by the end of most meetings, I’m resonating to such an extent that I need to find a room where I can just sit in the dark with the door locked to let my nervous system cool down. Perhaps worse still, as I’ve confirmed in discussed with autistic colleaues, on most campuses and open-plan offices the only place you can do this is a bathroom stall, which is not great.

Meetings are a lot. And conferences are even more. I love the saturation of both of these things, but they can also be a form of conviviality that defeats me sometimes. And I’m also aware that, as a regular facilitator of many things, I’m often the person who is leading the charge in designing forms of gathering that aren’t accessible and suitably inclusive. There’s so much to consider here in caring better for each other and finding ways to work together that are truly accessible (and by extension, effective). And as a designer of many colloquia myself, I think it’s important for us to be generous to people who are leading meetings given that inclusive design and execution of meetings is time consuming. Many covertly neurodivergent leaders are given demands to “be accessible” but not the time to do so well. We desparately need to adapt our social infrastructure and cultures to enable these things before we start telling managers to do them. I want things to be different, but doing different well, requires us to slow down, accommodate each other, and lower the level of expectation so that we can craft functional communities of practice.

Bearing this all in mind, if we were to rethink meeting design and structure, there are a few elements to consider, I think:

(1) It’s helpful to provide an explicit agenda, not just 5 vague titles, but explicit indications of what will be discussed, by whom, and what the purpose of the discussion will be. Note: potentially unreasonable time investment expectations here for facilitators. If you can, why not share this in advance? And perhaps you might even consider having a “living agenda” where the external processors can generate Q&A ahead of the meeting, identifying the truly intractable questions that can’t be worked out asynchronously on a shared online document and thus ought to be prioritised in the meeting.

(2) It’s worth thinking about shortening and simplifying our meeting agendas, really considering what we will be able to cover well (based on a holistic consideration of the parameters of neurodiversity) in a given window of time, and choosing only to present those items, rather than bringing an expectation that we’ll parse, sift and compartmentalise in the same way through a long list of items with various levels of development, significance and urgency. Maybe we need to do more 30 minute meetings with one-item agendas and we should limit 1 hour meetings to 3-item agendas as a maximum. And if you you’re planning out a meeting and think you can get through more than that, and want to exclude time for discussion why are we having a meeting at all? Please just email me, or create a collaborative document we can use for discussion, so we can pace our work and thinking in asynchronous ways and in digital venues.

(3) It’s helpful to provide opportunity for people to process and respond in a variety of ways. Short 5 minute, one-size-fits-all breakout groups will achieve a thing but not for everyone and certainly not inclusively. So perhaps it’s better to provide 30 minutes (or more!) for discussion / break-outs, with the option for some people to sit by themselves, some go for walks in pairs to infodump, and others sit in smaller groups to discuss. Or maybe you just make the presentation part of the meeting 20 minutes long and then devolve the meeting into various forms of discussion / processing. Facilitatirs please note, forms of discrimination will be tacitly present in your meeting and past histories will be driving social anxiety for some of your participants, so it is your duty as a facilitator to do the work to normalise all options, and provide some level of facilitation / matchmaking to enable inclusive groups to form.

(4) It’s gracious to support different kinds of focal attention. People like me might need a distraction or find a way to check-out mentally if not physically if they’re oversaturated while presentation is underway. But also, my conscious and subconscious attention work together in ways that I don’t completely understand and sometimes if I can do something distracting in the foreground, listening to music, reading emails, scrolling a web page that a speaker has mentioned, playing with legos, fidget toys, taking a walk etc., the complex thing I was trying to sort out will continue to work along in the background and some of the unnecessary background noise can fade a bit. I often process and understand a speaker more effectively if I am doing something else.