NeuroConverse

DOI: 10.82005/NC_03.01.00

This edition of NeuroConverse asks us to consider a deceptively simple, and yet globally inescapable, question: the intercultural nature of neurodiversity. Can neurodiversity ever be understood apart from culture? While neurodivergence is often discussed as a matter of cognition, diagnosis, legal status, social positioning, or educational practice, the contributions in this issue remind us that every neurodivergent experience is lived within communities, languages, traditions, institutions, tensions, and relationships. Neurodiversity does not exist in a vacuum: it is always cultural.

We begin with Dr Helen Ross's reflective opinion piece, Reflections on a Churchill Fellowship: Perspectives on the (Lack of) Choices We Afford Our Children and Young People. Drawing on insights gathered through international research and dialogue, Ross introduces the theme of understanding across borders and contemplates how different educational systems approach literacy, assistive technology, and learner support. Her reflections return repeatedly to the importance of agency and choice, reminding us that meaningful inclusion requires more than just providing support; it requires listening carefully to the diverse ways in which young people themselves wish to learn, participate, and flourish, wherever they come from.

Then we encounter Learning With One Another: Storytelling, Community, and the Co-Creation of Neuroaffirming Educational Practice, a thoughtful and innovative exploration of narrative as both method and pedagogy. Drawing together educators from Australia and the United Kingdom, the authors argue that storytelling can transcend geographical and institutional boundaries, creating spaces where lived experience becomes a legitimate source of knowledge. Their work challenges conventional professional development models that privilege expertise over experience (and, consequently, privilege “the elite” and often economically more wealthy over those whose lives are impacted and who do not have the advantages of wealth and social status), instead proposing a form of intercultural dialogue grounded in reciprocity, vulnerability, and shared meaning-making. The stories presented are not merely accounts of neurodivergence; they are encounters across differences of discipline, geography, and personal history. Through narrative, the authors open a discursive space and show how understanding emerges not from instruction alone, but from relationship.

The conversation then expands considerably in AI and Inclusive Education in the African Context: Navigating Digital Divide Gaps, Building Equitable Futures. Here, the focus broadens from interpersonal encounters to global systems, asking how emerging technologies can support neurodivergent and disabled learners in contexts too often overlooked by dominant educational narratives. The authors offer a powerful challenge to the narrative that technological innovation is inherently inclusive. Instead, they demonstrate how AI systems frequently carry the cultural, linguistic, and economic assumptions (as well as the aims and purposes) of their creators, often reflecting priorities rooted in the Global North. The result is a sobering reminder that accessibility without cultural awareness is only partial inclusion. Whether considering local languages, community knowledge, disability stigma, or infrastructural realities, the paper argues persuasively that equitable education requires solutions designed, not alongside but within, communities. We should get away from the comfort of “knowing what is good for people, and imposing it upon them”.

Taken together, these contributions show that neurodiversity and neurodifference cannot be separated from cultural context. They show how understanding grows through stories shared across borders, how educational technologies must be shaped by the communities they serve, and how international exchange can challenge assumptions about support, participation, and choice. All three challenge universalising and monolithic approaches that assume one model of inclusion can fit all contexts. Instead, they advocate for approaches that are relational, participatory, and culturally responsive.

Running through these contributions is a common commitment to epistemic humility: the recognition – especially in a time when both the UK (through an academic study associated with SASC, the SpLD Assessment Standards Committee) and the US-based International Dyslexia Association have updated their own definitions of dyslexia to fit their own groups’ aims and purposes – that no single institution, discipline, culture, or technology possesses a monopoly on knowledge. Whether through the exchange of stories between educators, the development of locally grounded AI systems, or international reflection on educational practice, inclusion emerges when diverse voices are not merely accommodated, but actively enabled and empowered to shape the conversation itself.

In this sense, the theme of this issue is not simply neurodiversity, but neurodiversity both in and as dialogue: dialogue between individuals, between cultures, between communities, between histories, between local and global perspectives, and between different ways of knowing – indeed, potentially, different forms of rationality. It reminds us that the future of neuroaffirming practice depends not only on understanding difference, but on understanding the cultural worlds in which difference is understood, positioned, and lived.