structural energetics

Part 1

This is the first chapter of the Neuro*Trans* Theory-Methods Package that I completed for my alternative comprehensive exam, which was a book proposal. The remainder of the proposal, which focuses on the structural roots of neurotypism themselves, can be found on the Chthonic Bookshelf.

I will expand the concept of epistemic euphoria by putting this preface in conversation with my poem, “epistemic dysphoria,” in Structural Energetics, Pt. 2.

Structural Energetics will be a series that discusses the development of my theory of the same name, which breaks the fourth wall of the ivory tower, community psychology, and community itself; offers a primordial, sacral take on gnostic, "New Age” mysticism; and seeks to provide an undisciplined yet grounded philosophical praxis rooted in play magic.

preface

“Because that’s how we roll. Pretty much, it’s like, “I have a piece of information you seem to be missing. You may or may not be ready to hear this, but I’ll tell you anyway. Because knowledge is power, ignorance is a cage, and feelings can be dealt with. I bid you good day.”” 

- Hannah Gadsby, Autistic comedian 

Encountering Epistemic Intimacy & Euphoria

This book has been an unexpected personal project of cognitive cartography. For most of my life, my cognition has existed squarely in the medical model - always problematic, always (neuro)queer, always the square peg in the round hole. Through engaging in this creation process, it slowly spilled outside the boundaries of the box as I began to map my cognition - expanding further the more I understood each facet of my neurodivergence. I experienced this as separate from the substantive content - making a binary Cartesian cut between body and mind. When I found Clarke, Friese, and Washburn’s (2017) Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory After the Interpretive Turn, I was shocked. While I had dabbled in complexity and systems theories, methodology that actually aligned with multiplicity had thus far eluded me. I read the book in one day, in literal awe of how Clarke articulated my epistemic experience, an understanding of which I had only ever been able to grasp for in the dark. 

“Why could I be so intelligent, but struggle to leave any proof?” 

After a lifetime of being called an airhead and told I had no common sense, I arrived tentatively at the conclusion (in maybe the second year of my doctoral program) that I might be smart. I couldn’t be sure…but the possibility was now on the table. 

“I find it very difficult to connect with others because my brain takes me to places where nobody else lives.” 

My constant state when occupying normative spatiotemporality - trying (and failing) to operate at the same speed as everyone else and situate my brain in the same space - is confusion. I started realizing that I have these moments of epistemic euphoria (a la gender euphoria) where I find poetry, art, academic writing, or some other medium of expression with language I have used or that conveys concepts I have also thought about, and it is just dopamine central. This may seem wildly mundane to a neurotypical person. I feel the euphoria because, to me, that is access intimacy; that is co-existing with someone, regardless of time or space; that is community. 

Hyperlexia

Growing up, I devoured texts that illuminated ‘the social,’ consuming books - and books - at a time on subject matter ranging from pop psychology and psychopathy to Erving Goffman’s Stigma (2009). A core (hyperlexic) childhood experience of mine was the annual family trip to the Innisfree Bookshop in so-called Meredith, New Hampshire, located at the edge of Lake Wiwininebesake.

Lake Wiwininebesake (Winnipesaukee) is situated on “N’dakinna, the traditional ancestral homeland of the Abenaki, Pennacook and Wabanaki Peoples past and present. I acknowledge and honor with gratitude the land and waterways and the alnobak (people) who have stewarded N’dakinna throughout the generations” (Indigenous NH Collaborative Collective, 2022).

 Over the years, I developed a ritual of pouring over the jam-packed wooden bookshelves, meticulously selecting between three and five books, and finishing them by the end of our week-long excursion to the lake. A not insignificant part of this ritual consisted of a subsequent stop at Ben & Jerry’s and a quick dip into Lee’s Candy Kitchen to stock up on snackage. 

Hyperfocus

In college, the subjects of my hyperfocus evolved into neuroscience; critical theory – lifelong favorites of which include Foucault’s Discipline & Punish (1972) and Madness and Civilization (1988); McRuer’s Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence (2010); Garland-Thomson’s Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory (2002); Collins’ Black Feminist Thought (2002); and crip and trans* theories; psychological theory – especially St. Clair’s social script theory (n.d.), minority identity development models, work on invisible illnesses and queer ‘passing,’ and an introduction to Black Feminist ideology through double jeopardy models of intersecting minority stress (Meyer & Frost, 2013); and everything related to so-called ‘abnormal’ psychology. Among the most influential were my philosophy courses, with perhaps the most salient being the Philosophy of Disability course I took in the Spring of 2012. The class was my introduction to critical studies. While I would not come to understand my disabled, neuroqueer, and queer identities for almost another decade, the specific pieces of scholarship I engaged with existed, for me, in the place of an authentic, reciprocal, nonviolent sense of community I had yet to experience. The connection I felt to this new type of knowledge could not have been described as anything other than relational. 

Aptly, I graduated from The George Washington University (GW) in 2014 with a major in Psychology and minors in Biology, Philosophy, and Theater. GW is located in so-called Washington, District of Columbia on the stolen ancestral homelands of the Piscataway, Anacostan, and Nacotchtank Peoples, who were among the first in the Western Hemisphere (GW Office for Equity, Diversity, and Community Engagement, n.d.). After 74 years, GW removed its moniker, the ‘Colonials,’ in response to our student petition on May 6, 2022. 

“GW’s campuses in the District of Columbia border the confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers, a historic center of trade and cultural exchange between several tribal nations. For generations, the Piscataway and Anacostian Peoples have resided in this region and served as stewards of the local land and waterways. Following European genocide and other harms that continue today, the Piscataway people continue to call this region home, honoring and celebrating their culture and relationship with the land” (GW Division for Student Affairs, n.d.). 

“[I] acknowledge that much of what we know of the United States & GW today, including its culture, economic growth, and development, has been made possible by the labor of enslaved Africans, their descendants, and their ascendants who suffered the horror of the transatlantic trafficking of their people, chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and other harms that continue today. [I am] indebted to their labor and their sacrifice, and [myself and the GW community] must acknowledge the tremors of that violence throughout the generations and the resulting impact that can still be felt and witnessed today” (GW Division for Student Affairs, n.d.). 

I honor the members of the GW community that are and have been disproportionately impacted by intersecting systems of oppression at the university, including the eight students that completed suicide and the many others that were harmed by ableist, sanist, racist, cisheterosexist, and classist university structures during my four-year tenure at GW. 

Hybrid Ecological Connectivity

Remote connectivity to North Carolina State University and hybrid connectedness to the land remained continuous throughout these feelings of disconnectedness and confusion. For the past six years, I have been attending graduate school at NC State, first obtaining my M.Ed. in Counseling and now completing my final year of the Applied Social and Community Psychology PhD program. 

“The land that North Carolina State University sits on is land that was originally stewarded by two Indigenous tribes: the Tuscarora and the Catawba tribes. We honor these tribes today by recognizing that this institution of higher education is built on land stolen from those who were here before the colonizers arrived. Additionally this land has borne witness to over 400 years of the enslavement, torture, and systematic mistreatment of African people and their descendants. We honor these people today by recognizing them in order to break the cycle of colonization and the continued erasure of Indigenous and Black peoples. We must acknowledge the history of the spaces and places we occupy to both understand and unlearn the many ways that we have been socialized” (NC State Division of Academic and Student Affairs, n.d.). 

I would further like to acknowledge the mass sterilization of poor, physically disabled, developmentally and intellectually disabled, LGBTQIA+, and Black North Carolinians after World War II, reaching around 7,600 people by 1974. This eugenic campaign by the North Carolina State Government remains significant because it was one of the few states to increase these efforts after the war and one of the last to both end the program (1977) and make forced sterilization illegal (2003). Today, North Carolina is one of the only states who has gone beyond making this illegal and paid reparations. I would also like to recognize the work of Ronald Mace, a disabled NC State Design student who initiated the Universal Design movement in the 1960s. I am indebted to those who have come before me. Lastly, I honor the 1.06 million people who have died of COVID-19; the 96 million who have contracted the COVID-19 virus since the onset of the pandemic; the average of 47,112 people per day that have reported cases of COVID-19 in the past week; and those who are forced to exist in situations of precarity, such as those with developmental and intellectual disabilities in congregate settings, who are six to thirty times more likely to die of COVID-19 (Ritchie, et al., 2022).  

Community, Interrupted

“Somewhere along the way I decided to be an autism academic, but first I was just autistic, then an advocate, then I was an activist, all before the academy told me to leave those at the door” (Botha, 2021, p. 2)

My route to community was fraught… or, rather, tau(gh)t – I inhabited only the borders of each community with which I came into contact, teetering on a frayed tightrope that could snap at any second. Always on (the) edge, I took solace in the safety net of scholarly literature that hung below. While this experience of epistemic intimacy and relationality served as a personal technology of survival, the sustainability of my scholarly safety net was tenuous at best in the absence of an ontology (philosophy of being) and epistemology (philosophy of knowledge) that recognized (my) neuro* existence as whole and human, instead of relegating it to the subhuman status of a failed or broken neurotypical personhood. 

Botha (they/them; 2021) narrates a parallel experience as an autistic person in the field of Community Psychology in their article, “Academic, Activist, or Advocate? Angry, Entangled, and Emerging: A Critical Reflection on Autism Knowledge Production.” They describe spending “years reading both broadly and deeply on philosophy of science to reconcile [their] discomfort with Psychology and [their] discomfort of being an autistic person creating autism science… [feeling] like a traitor to contribute to the field who not only made [them] into a category, but who also categorically dehumanized [them]” while their colleagues struggled to understand why they “overthought” it so much (p. 6). Like Botha (2021), I write in an attempt to, if not reconcile, explore my entanglement (Barad, 2007) with psychology - specifically, a psychology that does, at the very least, not acknowledge and, at the worst, contributes to the erasure of my existence and that of neuro* communities as a whole. 

“Overthinking”

This path of inquiry started out as an embodied feeling - one of not belonging, of being on the outside looking in. As I have described, my experience of community has been more or less equivalent to living with a lakefront view - but never actually swimming in the lake. This feeling heightened exponentially starting in Fall of 2019 due to the onset of the pandemic; the onset of the worst case of (autistic) burnout I have ever experienced, which prompted the realization I was autistic; and the first year of my Community Psychology program (Deweerdt, 2020; Higgins et al., 2021; Mantzalas et al., 2022; Raymaker et al., 2020; Zener, 2019). These factors increased the salience of my crip and neuro* identities in my everyday life, meaning I was more frequently bumping up against ontological, epistemological, and material walls designed to reinforce dominant normative structures. Running into walls is not a new experience for me, given my neuro* lack of spatial awareness. However, given the invisibility of these walls, I would walk around not knowing why I felt confined, excluded, and bruised. It became such that I ran into the walls so frequently it felt like I was confined to a small room - institutionalized outside of community. The insidious nature of these onto-epistemological structures of community psychology lies in the fact that they are invisibl(ized) and made to seem inevitable - beneficial, even.

The turning point for me was the sudden ubiquity of Zoom Fatigue discourse in 2020. It turned the nagging feeling into an ear-splitting alarm. There was a dissonance between this embodied experience and my ability to verbalize what was wrong, but it kept screaming that “things” were “getting worse”; that it was a pivotal time in terms of developing an overall ethic of neuroqueer justice and solidarity among disabled, mad, and neuroqueer people; and both the “community” and “psychology” worlds of my graduate studies were somehow not worlds I was meant to occupy. This text is the result of my quest not just to resolve this dissonance between the non-verbal and the verbal but to understand the “how.” The more I learned - and the less this knowledge reflected my experience and community intuition - the more the room shrank, the more I ran into these walls.

In this liminal space, I struggled (and continue to do so) with an internalized expectation to take on the project of combating ignorance serving to advance neuro* oppression in this not-post-pandemic era because of my commitment to community psychology values and principles - especially social justice and accountability to oppressed groups (Nelson & Prilleltensky, 2010, p. 66). The cost of the accompanying presupposition that my relived trauma - the painful knowledge of the oppressed - is somehow public property or fair price to pay for the cost of such deep emotional labor is ontic burnout:

“a form of dissociative explanatory fatigue—an erosion of self—[that] is routinely dismissed because privileged persons fail to understand the emotional burden ‘painful knowledge’ propagates, in terms of how it was acquired, what it costs to bear, and finally, the toll it takes (one-off and cumulative) when transmitted in situations requiring repeated explanations to what are sometimes potentially hostile or over-zealous audiences” (Dunne & Kotsonis, 2022). 

What is hardest for me to reconcile is the seeming inevitability of this specific type of ontic burnout as a queer, crip, nonbinary, neuro* academic - specifically, community psychologist. The danger of the ontic violence precipitating this burnout lies in the fact that, should I be forced into conditions in which I am too disoriented and exhausted to get out of the confined room, these structures persist and “community” proceeds outside of its walls. With that, eugenics would have succeeded. 

Over the past year of research, I have continuously doubted my reality, questioning how I could think that a field which centers community, social justice, and ecological perspectives could even be involved in the oppression of of neuro* communities. Both fortunately and unfortunately, the more I searched, the more I found to support the embodied ‘twinge’ that alerted me to ‘something off.’ Regardless, others still cannot see this confining structure; they do not understand that I am desperately clawing the walls, trying to escape - they only see hysteria. 

A Testimony to Embodied Experience

After writing this section, I came upon a short reflection I wrote in January 2021 and an article that reflected similar knowledge and experiences of knowing that spurred feelings of epistemic euphoria and intimacy. Though the presence of similar themes in my own writing could be dismissed as simple internal consistency, the connection moved beyond this interpretation. The “Overthinking” section of this text, the “Ling(aut)istics Embodied” piece, and Whatcott and Ben-Moshe’s (2021) abstract reflect three different perspectives. I will share these pieces - not only to let you peek into an experience of epistemic euphoria and intimacy, but also to demonstrate the validity of embodied experience through its convergence across a variety of ways of knowing, including the personal journaling, literary fiction, and academic scholarship shared below. I will first present the second two pieces and then move into the analysis. 

I am (incredibly) tempted to edit this to “improve” the writing, but here is the reflection (that I thought no one would see!): 

“Lingu(Aut)istics Embodied 

How becoming disabled pushed me out of the neuroqueer closet 

Embodied Ableism

Embodying Ableism

Dis/Embodying Ableism

In embodying disablement, I realize there has been a brick wall built inside my body, bolstering my skin like a skeleton as I perform abled embodiment. But the brick wall is solid and crumbles easily while I move in ways that are not my own - and in ways that are my own. Constantly crumbling, no matter how I move. My head hit the ceiling. My brain reverberated within my skull, acting as a wrecking ball to the brick wall that held my body in a way that was presentable to the world while hiding it from the world at the same time. As the wrecking ball slammed against the brick, again and again, everything that hid me from the world and myself fell away. My body slumped, unable to move - but in a different way than before. My brain was unable to move, the words escaped out of the gaping holes left among the crumbling brick like they were running back home after being held hostage. 

There was no hiding 

But there was no need to hide, maybe the world was hiding from me, or hiding me.

It felt like this wall coming down let me enter this whole new country, I crossed the boundary and entered into a world with a new culture - I assimilated and learned the language. 

At first, I thought that my language had not been taught to me. While still true - I realize that the brick wall not only stopped me from learning my own language but also refused me access to myself in the way that I experience communication, language, and authentic, reciprocal interaction between myself and the world. I don’t just have one language. Though I needed the words to understand my experience, I was denied my experience - linguistics of sensory experience, expression, etc.” 

The article, “Abolishing the Broom Closets in Omelas: Feminist Disability Analysis of Crisis and Precarity,” by Whatcott and Ben-Moshe, that I happened upon while wrapping up edits on this text, was also published in the Winter of 2021. [My reaction to this is: “like, what???”] I include the abstract to demonstrate the concordance among these three pieces of writing. 

“Ursula K. Le Guin's 1973 short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" depicts a utopian city where the happiness of most of the citizens depends on the misery of a child who lives in a broom closet. We activate the story in the midst of a global pandemic which is laying bare the pre-existing conditions of precarity under gendered settler racial capitalism. We interpret Le Guin's story through an intersectional feminist disability lens, emphasizing the necessity of attending to disability and the carceral institutionalization of disabled people as key to understanding how precarity is distributed. We make the case that "Omelas" represents places of disability confinement, specifically the institutionalization of disabled people in psychiatric and congregate facilities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

By examining two such institutions in Salem, Oregon (Omelas spelled backwards), we make explicit the connections between capitalist precarity and carceral disablement. We argue that disability is key to understanding the capitalist crisis because disablement and the construction of the ability/disability binary has been a key mechanism for constructing disposability in the crisis of capitalism. Turning from crisis of late stage capitalism to the crisis of genre, we show that Le Guin's story forces us to confront the role of ongoing eugenics and ableism in the imagination of feminist abolition. We show how "Omelas" offers a different kind of abolitionist horizon in the form of the "ones who walk away." We, however, push to identify with the child in the broom closet and not the ones for whom the story poses a dilemma. We end with the psych survivors and self-advocacy organizers who cannot physically "walk away," but who instead lead the fight for the abolition of the broom closet from within.” 

“Ling(aut)istics Embodied” was written as a reflection about my embodied experiences beginning in July of 2018, when I had my fifth and most damaging concussion, the effects of which peaked in 2019 but I continue to experience today. At the time of this reflection, I had just come to learn about disability, disability justice, and neuroqueerness. It was the first time I was able to verbally express my concussion and post-concussion experience, not (only) because of a neuro* difference between verbal and nonverbal, but because my concussion took away my ability to think complete sentences. The only way I could orally communicate, after some time, was through singing (isn’t the brain fascinating?). I now know that I have been crip and chronically ill my entire life, but I did not come to view myself as disabled/crip until the year after my concussion - when I wrote this. I also believe that, in many ways, the concussion forced me to consider the nonverbal/my embodiment because I could no longer use my verbal capacity. I could no longer completely dissociate from my neuroqueer embodied experience in order to survive. The “Ling(aut)istics Embodied” piece reflects on the internal(ized), embodied experience of disability, neuro* experience, and the impact of performing able-bodiedness. It also reflects when I realized there was more than one way to exist, how that knowledge had been withheld from me, and how that denied me the experience of learning my own physical and social language. This will later be discussed in terms of structural and epistemic gaslighting. 

The “Overthinking” section above reflects on the external walls comprised of ontology, epistemology, and the ways in which they show up in the world. In recognizing the invisible, embodied walls I have been running into, I had a slow, dawning “a-ha” moment identifying the small, confined room that these external walls made. My understanding of Ben Moshe’s work on the intersection of disability and carcerality, the basis for this book, helped me identify that this small-confined room, while isolating, was not isolated. Ben Moshe (2020) discusses carcerality - the quality of relating to incarceration - in terms of the “carceral archipelago.” An archipelago is a group of islands, or “an area that contains a chain or group of islands scattered in lakes, rivers, or the ocean” (National Ocean Service, 2021). As such, the carceral archipelago refers to the group of institutions scattered throughout society that adopt carceral praxis, or carceral theories based on punishment logic and practices. My operationalization of punishment here follows that of prison abolitionist Miriame Kaba - “as inflicting suffering on others in response to an experience of harm/violence/wrongdoing” (Project NIA, 2020). 

Just as it is important to know that this group of institutions exists, it is equally imperative to understand how these institutions proliferate. Transinstitutionalization refers to the movement from one carceral institution to another, typically used to describe the movement of people with psychiatric and intellectual disabilities “from almshouses to state facilities, from psychiatric institutions to prisons [a direct correlation Ben Moshe refutes] (Thakker et al., 2007), and to insufficient networks of community support (Slovenko, 2003)” (as cited in Haley & Jones, 2020). Beyond the “prisons are the new asylums” discourse, these transitions often occur outside of the public consciousness, as the institutions are seen as completely separate entities. Rarely is a connection made among prisons, psychiatric institutions, group homes, nursing homes, sheltered workshops, detention centers, and community corrections (Ben-Moshe, 2011). However, these locations of incarceration all rely on the same logic, whether confined by concrete walls or open-air, of punishment for existing outside of the norm. Through this analysis of transinstitutionalization, I could understand that this invisible, confined room was connected to broader disability and neuro* institutionalization. 

The abstract by Whatcott and Ben-Moshe (2021) calls upon the Broom Closet to discuss the relationship between the institutionalization of “feeblemindedness” and the “good life.” It makes readily apparent that “[the] question of disposability—who can or should be sacrificed for the good life of the community to continue—is a lived reality in 2021” (Whatcott & Ben-Moshe, 2021). It provides context for the ‘alarm bell’ that prompted my identification of Zoom Fatigue, framing it as a sort of dog-whistle acting to conceal “something.” The purpose of this text is to identify that something.

Nelson and Prilleltensky (2010) share their belief that “being a community psychologist is a question of identity, a definition of who we are and who we want to be” (p. 152). Following their conceptualization of the community psychologist as a whole person with entwined political, personal, and professional selves, I hope to embrace an ethic of conscientização, as conceived by Friere (1970a). I embrace the function of education as cultural action (Friere, 1970b) and seek to develop a substantive foundation for the critical consciousness and awareness of the sociocultural conditions that oppress neuro* people, the mechanisms that sustain them, and how they can be transformed (Lloyd, 1972). In the spirit of Friere (Lloyd, 1972), this knowledge can serve to liberate both the oppressed and the oppressor. I use an approach rooted in the reality that oppression is not just ideological, but has tangible material implications; recognizes humans, nonhuman animals, and objects as all having importance in discovering the mechanics of oppression; and continues to be constituted by and constitute discourse. Dismantling the notion that the dominant and normative reality of the oppressor is the only way to live simultaneously dismantles the fear of change and freedom of the oppressor, the internalized fear of the oppressed, and frees the oppressed and the oppressor to create new, liberated worlds. A number of researchers throughout community psychology history have taken to examining the field’s philosophy of science and theorizing phenomena in new and creative ways. While I disidentify from mainstream community psychology for reasons above and reasons I will articulate below, I do believe that engaging with community psychology as a field will support a rich analysis of the “why,” “how,” and “what now” of community. 

Aims of This Text

This text is an empirical exploration into the ways that the epistemic euphoria I described, the ontologies in which I am allowed to exist, and the methodologies that honor my cognition have been historically and presently situated out of my grasp. Camouflaged by logics of treatment, cure, confinement, and erasure, holistic neurodivergent existence is systemically inaccessible. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, this project seeks to make intelligible previously invisibilized aspects of Community Psychology’s onto--epistemological discourse that have functioned - and continue to function - to oppress and dehumanize neuro* (and non-neuro*) communities. Through imagining a Neuro* Theory Methods Package, I strive to resist this oppression by centering epistemic euphoria and holistic (ontic) existence throughout the text, illuminating the mechanics of oppression and the mechanics of imagining otherwise.

References

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.

Ben-Moshe, L. (2011). Genealogies of resistance to incarceration: Abolition politics within deinstitutionalization and anti-prison activism in the US (Doctoral dissertation, Syracuse University).

Ben-Moshe, L. (2020). Decarcerating disability: Deinstitutionalization and prison abolition. U of Minnesota Press.

Collier, A. (1994). Critical realism: An introduction to Roy Bhaskar's philosophy. Verso.

Collins, P. H. (2002). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge.

Deweerdt, S. (2020). Autistic burnout, explained. Spectrum News.

Dunne, G., & Kotsonis, A. (2022). Epistemic exploitation in education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1-13.

Egner, J. E. (2019). “The disability rights community was never mine”: Neuroqueer disidentification. Gender & Society, 33(1), 123-147.

Foucault, M. (1975, 2012). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage.

Foucault, M. (1988). Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Vintage.

Freire, P. (1970a). Cultural action and conscientization. Harvard educational review, 40(3), 452-477.

Freire, P. (1970b). Pedagogy of the oppressed (MB Ramos, Trans.). New York: Continuum, 2007.

Garland-Thomson, R. (2002). Integrating disability, transforming feminist theory. NWSA Journal, 14(3), 1-33.

Goffman, E. (2009). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Simon and schuster.

Haley, T. L., & Jones, C. T. (2020). Sites and shapes of transinstitutionalization. Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 9(3), 1-15.

Higgins, J. M., Arnold, S. R., Weise, J., Pellicano, E., & Trollor, J. N. (2021). Defining autistic burnout through experts by lived experience: Grounded Delphi method investigating# AutisticBurnout. Autism, 25(8), 2356-2369.

Johnson, M. L. (2021). Neuroqueer feminism: turning with tenderness toward borderline personality disorder. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 46(3), 635-662.

Lloyd, A. S. (1972). Freire, conscientization, and adult education. Adult education, 23(1), 3-20.

Mantzalas, J., Richdale, A. L., Adikari, A., Lowe, J., & Dissanayake, C. (2022). What is autistic burnout? A thematic analysis of posts on two online platforms. Autism in Adulthood, 4(1), 52-65.

McRuer, R. (2010). Compulsory able-bodiedness and queer/disabled existence. The disability studies reader, 3, 383-392.

Meyer, I. H., & Frost, D. M. (2013). Minority stress and the health of sexual minorities.

Nelson, G., & Prilleltensky, I. (2010). Community psychology: In pursuit of liberation and well-being. Palgrave Macmillan.

Oswald, A. G., Avory, S., & Fine, M. (2021). Intersectional expansiveness borne at the neuroqueer nexus. Psychology & Sexuality, 1-12.

Rauchberg, J. S. (2022). Imagining a neuroqueer technoscience. Studies in Social Justice, 16(2), 370-388.

Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Delos Santos, A., ... & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). “Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew”: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in adulthood, 2(2), 132-143.

Ritchie, H., Mathieu, E., Rodés-Guirao, L., Appel, C., Giattino, C.,  Ortiz-Ospina, E., Hasell, J., Macdonald, B., Beltekian, D., & Roser, M. (2020) - "Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19)". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus' [Online Resource]

Smilges, J. L. (2021). Neuroqueer Literacies; or, Against Able-Reading. College Composition and Communication, 73(1), 103-125.

Spiegel D., & Cardeña E. (1991). Disintegrated experience: the dissociative disorders revisited. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 100, 366–378.

St. Clair, R. N. S. SOCIAL SCRIPTS AND THE STRUCTURE OF PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE.

Tompkins, A. (2014). "Asterisk." Transgender Studies Quarterly. 1.1-2: 26-27. 

Zener, D. (2019). Journey to diagnosis for women with autism. Advances in autism, 5(1), 2-13.