Increasingly, neurodivergent people are sharing their own narratives and conducting their own research. Prominent individuals have integrated the ‘nothing about us without us’ slogan, used by neurodivergent and other disabled social activists, into academia. This article imagines a neuromixed academia. We consider how to work through challenges present in neuromixed encounters; to support cross-neurotype communication and pave the way for an ethos of community and collaboration. We explore how we might create a space in which neurodivergent experiences are seen as just one part of our complex and multifaceted identities. We do this through the process of ‘cutting our own keys’, to try out new possibilities of neurodivergent storying aimed at finding ourselves in our own stories about neurodivergence. This involves borrowing and developing methodological approaches formulated outside of research on different forms of neurodivergence, and to invent our own concepts based on our own embodied experiences and the social worlds we inhabit. Throughout, we mingle our own autoethnographic accounts in relation to research accounts and theories, as a way of illustrating the work with the text as a thinking about neurodivergence with each other in itself. Lay abstract A lot of people who do research are also neurodivergent (such as being autistic or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), but neurodivergent people do not always feel welcome in research spaces which are often shaped around neurotypical people. Some neurotypical researchers lack confidence in talking to neurodivergent people, and others feel like neurodivergent people might not be able to do good research about other people who are like them without being biased. We think it is important that all researchers are able to work well together, regardless of whether they are neurotypical, autistic, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (or any other neurotype) – in truly ‘neurodiverse’ teams. In this article we talk about how to create better spaces for all researchers, where we feel valued for who we are and take each others’ needs into account. We do this using some approaches from other areas of research and talking about how they relate to our personal experiences of being neurodivergent researchers with our own personal stories. This article adds to a growing work on how we can work with people who are different from us, in more respectful and kind ways.

The Narratives of Neurodiversity Network (NNN) is a neurodivergent academic, creative, and educator collective that came together with allies during the Covid‐19 pandemic to create a network centred around emerging narratives about neuro-diversity and exploring new ways of learning and socialising. The network focuses on exploring the roles of written, spoken, and visual narratives across cultural locations about neuro‐atypical experiences in generating improved agency and self‐advocacy for those who have been subject to pathologization through neuro‐normativity and intersecting oppression. During the last year, widening access to digital platforms has provided a space to explore these issues outside of traditional academic spaces. We run a monthly “Salon,” our mixed‐media “reading, listening, and watching” group, in an effort to find positive representation within contemporary culture. Discussions have moved beyond mimesis and into a consideration of how narrative and storyworlds can question the supposed naturalness of certain ways of being in and perceiving the world. This article interrogates the network’s core principles of nonhierarchical co‐production, including the roles of creativity, community, identity, and emancipatory research which were animated by the new techno‐social context. We consider the cultural lives of neurodiversity in the West and beyond, including ethical and aesthetic dimensions. We share a faith in the power of storytelling to inform new social identities for neurodivergent people and to inform scientific understandings of atypical cognition. In exploring this, we speak through a porous first‐person plural narrator, to unsettle the idea that there is a hegemonic “we” speaking on behalf of all neurodivergent people.

This article is an investigation of neurodivergent reading practices. It is a collectively written paper where the focus is as much on an autoethnographic exploration of our autistic readings of autism/autistic fiction as it is on the read texts themselves. The reading experiences described come primarily from Yoon Ha Lee’s Dragon Pearl (2019) and Dahlia Donovan’s The Grasmere Cottage Mystery (2018), which we experience as opposite each other in how they depict their neurodivergent characters and speak to us as autistic readers. Through the article, we describe a formation of neurodivergent (critical) collective readings of autism/autistic fiction. The article contributes to an academic and activistic discourse around neurodivergent reader responses and power relations between neurodivergent and neurotypical readers and authors.