NeuroConverse

https://doi.org/10.82005/NC_02.01.00 

Visibility and Voice in Neurodiversity Research

This edition of NeuroConverse opens with a question that is as ethical as it is empirical, and as urgent as it is uncomfortable: what happens when the systems built to support young people instead expose their vulnerabilities? In Dr Neil Alexander-Passe’s lead article, Autism, School, and Crime: How School Can Lead Those with Autism into Crime, we are invited to look unflinchingly at the institutional pathways that can push autistic students toward criminalisation rather than inclusion. His analysis, which is both rigorous and deeply humane, asks us to reconsider how schooling structures reward conformity and punish difference. It reminds us that moral responsibility in education lies not in compliance, but in understanding. Conformity is easy. Understanding takes courage.

The conversation then broadens with Charles Freeman’s compelling and timely contribution, If It Does Not Get Measured, It Does Not Get Done: Neurodivergence and Data. Freeman exposes the “triple invisibility” of neurodivergent people – unseen to themselves, unseen to others, and unseen in public policy – showing how without data, invisibility thrives, as an absence of consistent data can perpetuate and worsen social and economic marginalisation (an observation which surely has repercussions for Dr Passe’s lead article on Autism, School, and Crime). His call for a “neurodiversity evidence toolkit” bridges the qualitative and quantitative, advocating for an empirical visibility that respects lived experience rather than erasing it. Once again, this is an argument that resonates with Alexander-Passe’s concern about how unseen differences can become unacknowledged systemic risks.

Finally, this issue concludes with a new section, NeuroconVerse, inaugurated by Jessica Dark’s beautifully moving and inventive Recognising Difference: A Neurodiversity-Affirming Poetic Autoethnography of Autism in Family Life. Dark’s work re-centres personal, transforming research into resonance. Through poetry, she reminds us that data and discourse are only part of the story: that difference is also felt, spoken, and even sung. In Dark’s work, difference becomes cadence.

Across these articles runs a consistent thread of visibility and invisibility: of systems that misrecognise, of professionals, themselves often unrecognised, who strive to respond, of a lack of data that reveals, and of the emergence of art that views in a different light, and so reframes. Together, they form a dialogue between structure and self, between measurement and meaning, and between science and story. This issue powerfully reaffirms the journal’s commitment to an ethically engaged scholarship – one that listens to neurodivergent voices not as objects of study, but as co-authors of understanding. Together, the research, the struggle, and the voices become powerfully visible.