In 2025, after 25 years as an independent researcher, I was awarded research funding for the first time. Not from the UK – I have written elsewhere about how independent researchers are not eligible for any UK government research funding, and how short-sighted I think that is – but from the Independent Social Research Foundation which is based in Europe. They gave me £7,100 to work with George Watts and Kate Fox towards a definition of neurodiversity-affirming space.

We are all neurodivergent ourselves, and we worked with neurodivergent people in an online and a face-to-face workshop. Of course we used creative methods: story stems, drawing, poems, mapping, collage plus a great deal of chat. Our participants were generous with their time and ideas. We also analysed creatively, combining thematic, poetic, and narrative analytic work. And we are disseminating creatively, through a zine which you can access here. Today I’m in Durham with George at the Neurodevelopment and Neurodiversity conference, where they said we could have a poster but we decided a zine would be better and fortunately the conference organisers were happy to give us the go-ahead. We have printed copies to give away and a QR code for people who want digital access.

Our findings are formulated as a working definition, reflecting both the scope of the project and the people we were able to include. With 20 participants, we achieved diversity across age, gender, and ethnicity, though we were not able to include non-speaking neurodivergent people — a meaningful gap that we want to name directly. I recently read Upward Bound by the non-speaking autistic writer Woody Brown, and it sharpened my thinking about whose experiences our definition may not yet capture. We offer this definition as a starting point, not a final word.  

Here’s our working definition:

• Neurodiversity-affirming spaces are physical and virtual environments which aim to enable neurodivergent people to function safely, comfortably and without judgment, with understanding and acceptance of their physical, emotional, and communication needs.
  
• Neurodiversity-affirming spaces are adaptive and responsive to the sensory and communication needs of the people in them, including non-speaking people, and to changes in those needs. 
  
• Neurodiversity-affirming spaces accord with the principles of the neurodiversity paradigm* (Walker 2021) which value the natural and creative diversity of different minds and ways of being. 

If you would like to download this, plus a note about the neurodiversity paradigm, you can do so here. The zine is available here, and the story I wrote from the narrative analysis (which wouldn’t fit into the zine) is here.

This is now for others to use and take forward. We hope it will prove useful.