Voices at the Margins: Podcasting as Neuroqueer Collaborative Autoethnography and Epistemic Healing

Abstract

This article introduces podcasting as a methodological advancement within critical neurodiversity studies, positioning it as a form of neuroqueer collaborative autoethnography that enables epistemic healing. Through a collaborative podcast episode featuring seven neurodivergent podcasters, we demonstrate how voice-centered, relational knowledge-making can disrupt traditional academic gatekeeping while affirming neurodivergent ways of knowing. Our approach combines neuroqueer theory's challenge to neuronormative research practices with collaborative autoethnography's emphasis on shared meaning-making, using podcasting as both method and medium. Guided by five open-ended questions rather than rigid scripts, our conversation exemplifies how podcasting can function as epistemic repair by restoring silenced ways of knowing through accessible, community-rooted dialogue. We argue that podcasting offers critical neurodiversity studies a participatory methodology that honors complexity, embraces messiness, and builds community while generating rigorous cultural critique. This work contributes to growing calls for neurodivergent-led research methodologies that serve communities rather than studying them.

Lay Abstract

This article explores how podcasting can be used as a research approach that centers neurodivergent voices, experiences, and ways of knowing. Instead of relying on traditional academic methods that often feel rigid or inaccessible, we used a collaborative podcast conversation with seven neurodivergent podcasters to create knowledge together. In this episode, we spoke openly, followed our curiosity, and allowed the discussion to unfold naturally, guided by a few broad questions rather than a strict script. We found that podcasting creates space for connection, authenticity, and shared meaning-making in ways that written research alone often cannot. Hearing each other's voices allowed us to express emotion, nuance, and relational insight that are usually left out of academic work. This process helped challenge narrow ideas about what “counts” as legitimate knowledge and supported the reclaiming of neurodivergent ways of thinking and communicating. Our findings show that podcasting can act as a form of healing and empowerment by validating experiences that are often ignored, misunderstood, or silenced. We suggest that podcasting is a powerful and inclusive research tool for critical neurodiversity studies, one that builds community, honors complexity, and supports research led by neurodivergent people rather than about them.

Introduction

The emergence of critical neurodiversity studies has opened new possibilities for challenging neuronormative and pathologizing approaches while advancing methodologies that center lived experience, complexity, and relationality (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2020). Within this landscape, podcasting provides a generative site for methodological experimentation. As both method and medium, it enables knowledge to circulate in ways that resist the rigid and exclusionary formats of academic publishing, creating space for neurodivergent voices to resonate and connect (Mellifont, 2019). When enacted as neuroqueer collaborative autoethnography, a collective mode of inquiry that grounds lived experience within its cultural and institutional conditions, podcasting becomes a relational and reflexive practice through which neurodivergent people critically narrate their experiences in dialogue with one another. In doing so, it resists demands for linear, polished self-narratives and instead embraces emotion, emergence, and interdependence as generative ways of knowing (Walker & Raymaker, 2021).

This paper draws on a collaboratively recorded podcast episode involving seven neurodivergent podcasters with diverse professional and lived experiences, including varied neurodivergent configurations and intersecting perspectives shaped by queerness, gender diversity, and experiences of navigating systemic barriers across academic and community contexts. The podcast episode took the form of a loosely scaffolded roundtable, guided by five open-ended prompts and designed to foreground relational dialogue, reflexive sense-making, and lived experience as knowledge. Through the podcast episode, we explore podcasting as a form of neuroqueer collaborative autoethnography, examining its capacity to support more accessible, relational, and resonant modes of knowledge-making (Chang et al., 2012; Stevens & Kirby, 2025; Walker, 2021). Specifically, we consider how podcasting can disrupt inaccessible knowledge spaces (Mellifont, 2019), reclaim lived experience as epistemic authority (Kulmala et al., 2024), hold complexity and messiness as generative (Walker & Raymaker, 2021), and cultivate resonance and belonging within neurodivergent communities (Barnett, 2024). The aim of the recording was to examine how podcasting might operate as a neuroqueer methodology for collaborative autoethnographic inquiry while enacting the relational, ethical, and epistemic commitments under discussion, positioning podcasting as a practice of epistemic healing through voice, connection, and collaboration (Khan & Naguib, 2017).

These commitments align with other critical podcast methodologies. Treco and Jordan (2024) show how DisCrit (Disability Critical Race Theory) podcasting disrupts ableist and racist master narratives by rezoning knowledge spaces around disabled voices, while Edwards-Schuth (2023) frames podcasting as radical praxis pedagogy, a public scholarship that generates counter-narratives, dialogic spirals, and community transformation. Collectively, these approaches demonstrate podcasting's emergence as a justice-oriented method of inquiry, which this project extends into critical neurodiversity studies.

Our approach also resonates with work on neurodivergent storying and the practice of self-authored narrative that resists deficit framings and generates new epistemic possibilities. Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al. (2022) describe this as “cutting our own keys,” developing narrative and methodological tools that enable neurodivergent people to access, reshape, and participate in knowledge spaces historically structured by neuronorms. Podcasting, as a collective and dialogic form of storying, becomes one such key by opening new pathways of resonance, recognition, and belonging while disrupting neuronormative accounts of neurodivergence.

This article contributes a methodological advancement by situating podcasting as a neuroqueer form of collaborative autoethnography, as an emergent, participatory, and relational practice within critical neurodiversity studies (Chang et al., 2012; Walker, 2021). Conceptually, it extends debates on accessibility and epistemic justice by framing podcasting as epistemic repair: a living archive of co-created meaning that affirms neurodivergent ways of knowing (Bhakuni, 2023; Walker, 2021). Practically, it offers a replicable design for accessible, participatory, neurodivergent-led knowledge-making that addresses intersectional exclusions in research (Le, 2024).

In what follows, we first situate podcasting within neuroqueer and collaborative autoethnographic traditions. We then outline the methodological design of the podcast episode before presenting a resonance-based analysis of the recorded conversation. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of podcasting as a neuroqueer methodology within critical neurodiversity studies, including its ethical tensions, limitations, and future possibilities.

Conceptual Framework

This paper is grounded in neuroqueer methodologies, which recognize that neurodiversity is not merely a descriptive category of difference but a vital axis of human variation shaped by power, privilege, and systemic oppression (Barnett, 2024; Walker & Raymaker, 2021). At their core, neuroqueer approaches resist neuronormativity, the pervasive and often invisible assumptions about what constitutes appropriate cognition, communication, behavior, and affect (Walker, 2021). Neuronormativity is reproduced and enforced through institutional structures, professional standards, and cultural expectations that marginalize neurodivergent ways of being (Chapman, 2023).

To neuroqueer, therefore, is to subvert these dominant norms not for provocation's sake, but in service of truth, authenticity, relational freedom, and connection (Stevens & Kirby, 2025; Walker, 2021). Neuroqueer methodologies make visible the social and epistemic conditions that shape knowledge production and enact practices of transformation through self-definition and relational creativity.

We do not suggest that podcasting is inherently neuroqueer by virtue of being an audio medium. Rather, its epistemic and political effects depend on how it is practiced, by whom, and within what relations of power (Treco & Jordan, 2024; Walker, 2021). Without reflexive attention to these dynamics, podcasting can reproduce familiar hierarchies and extractive practices from academic knowledge production (Chapman, 2023; Fricker, 2007). When shaped through neurodivergent-led, relational, and power-conscious approaches, however, podcasting can function as a neuroqueer methodology that resists epistemic domination (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2020). While grounded in neurodivergent-led practice, such work does not preclude non-neurodivergent researchers but requires the decentring of authority and accountability to neurodivergent collaborators (Chang et al., 2012; Walker & Raymaker, 2021). From this perspective, neuroqueer podcasting is best understood not as a neutral technique, but as an ethical orientation attentive to positionality, authorship, and the conditions under which voice is enabled or constrained (White, 2023).

This stance is deeply intertwined with epistemic justice. As Fricker (2007) describes, epistemic injustice occurs when people are undermined in their capacity to interpret and communicate their own experience, which is familiar to neurodivergent individuals whose narratives have been dismissed, medicalized, or reframed through deficit models. White (2023) emphasizes that liberation requires rewriting the master narrative, moving beyond interpretive frameworks that erase marginalized voices. Neuroqueer methodologies respond by centering lived experience as knowledge, embedding relational ethics, and privileging multiplicity over reduction.

Relational ethics conceptualize knowledge as something produced within webs of relationship and co-authored through community and culture (Kurtz, 2014). Within this framework, knowledge-making becomes a shared, reflexive process rather than a detached observation. Neurodivergent storying and naming practices illustrate this approach. Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al. (2023) describe how ADHD and AuDHD (Autism and ADHD) researchers reclaim naming as epistemic agency, shifting from deficit framings to acts of re-authoring that assert lived experience as scholarly authority. Naming is not neutral but a practice of self-definition that collapses binaries between researcher and researched, affirming identity as epistemic, political, and relational. This conceptual framework informs both the methodological orientation and ethical commitments, grounding the use of podcasting as a relational and neuroqueer practice of knowledge-making (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Reclaiming epistemic agency through community sharing.

Methodology

To bring these conceptual commitments into practice, we adopted neuroqueer collaborative autoethnography, an approach that fuses the reflexive and relational orientation of autoethnography with the anti-normative and transformative stance of neuroqueer theory (Stahlke Wall, 2016; Walker, 2021; Wall, 2006). Like traditional autoethnography, it situates lived experience as both subject and method, linking the personal to broader cultural, institutional, and structural contexts. However, it departs from conventional expectations of coherence and polish, deliberately embracing messiness, contradiction, affect, and emergence as productive features of inquiry (Pruder St. Antoine, 2021; Stahlke Wall, 2016).

Collaborative autoethnography extends this by positioning individual experience within shared analysis and collective reflection. It transforms personal narratives into sites of dialogic meaning-making, foregrounding power-sharing, reflexivity, and co-authorship (Chang et al., 2012). These qualities align closely with neuroqueer methodologies, providing a foundation for conceptualizing our podcast as both a methodological and ethical intervention.

Podcasting operationalizes these commitments by transforming voice, resonance, and dialogue into analytic tools. It creates space for epistemic compassion (Ling, 2018), a relational practice of witnessing, co-creation, and meaning-making grounded in care rather than disembodied expertise. Through layered reflection and unpolished conversation, podcasting brings neuroqueer frameworks to life in real time, resisting neuronormative gatekeeping and affirming participatory, embodied ways of knowing (Stevens & Kirby, 2025; Walker, 2021; Walker & Raymaker, 2021). In doing so, it enacts epistemic repair by restoring and sustaining ways of knowing that have been dismissed or marginalized (Bhakuni, 2023).

Recent methodological work has begun to formalize podcasting within qualitative research. Kulkov et al. (2024), for example, propose a structured seven-step framework for incorporating podcasts as data, including selection, transcription, and coding procedures. While such frameworks underscore podcasting's rigor, our approach demonstrates a different orientation. Rather than prioritizing standardization or replicability, we treat podcasting as a neuroqueer practice that embraces friction, emotion, and imperfection as epistemically generative. This contrast underscores our contribution: extending podcasting beyond data collection to a critically reflexive methodology that enacts epistemic repair and sustains neurodivergent ways of knowing.

Le (2024) further advances this orientation through critical autoethnography and data feminism, illustrating how intersectional neurodivergent experiences expose persistent gaps in accessibility research. Le identifies three tenets for reconceptualizing neurodivergence: understanding difference as functional rather than deficit, recognizing disability as a dynamic moment of friction, and treating accessibility as a collaborative process. In alignment with these tenets, our podcast enacted neuroqueer methodologies through dialogue, resonance, and co-created meaning, transforming method into practice.

Ultimately, this methodology extended neurodivergent collective research traditions by creating space for participants to narrate and name themselves on their own terms, as an act of self-authorship that resists reductive or pathologizing framings and affirms identity as fluid, relational, and self-determined (Barnett, 2024; Walker, 2021). Neuroqueer collaborative autoethnography thus enabled re-storying and re-naming as acts of epistemic compassion and repair (Bhakuni, 2023; Ling, 2018), grounded in critical reflection and sustained through relational ethics.

Podcasting encompasses a wide range of genres and production practices, from highly scripted, host-centered documentary formats to loosely scaffolded, dialogic, community-based conversations (Edwards-Schuth, 2023; Kulkov et al., 2024). These distinctions are not merely stylistic; they carry material implications for gatekeeping, accessibility, and epistemic authority, particularly in relation to who is authorized to speak, how narratives are shaped, and which audiences are presumed (Chapman, 2023; Fricker, 2007). Accordingly, we do not suggest that podcasting is inherently liberatory as a medium, but emphasize that its epistemic effects depend on how it is practiced and situated within relations of power (Treco & Jordan, 2024).

While the podcast episode examined here took the form of a semi-structured roundtable, we do not suggest that neuroqueer podcasting is defined by informality alone. Scripted or heavily edited formats may also support neuroqueer aims when guided by principles of relational accountability, accessibility, and epistemic humility (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2022; Treco & Jordan, 2024). Conversely, conversational formats can reproduce epistemic hierarchy when authority, control, or narrative coherence are prioritized over emergence and multiplicity (Chapman, 2023; Fricker, 2007). What distinguishes neuroqueer podcasting, then, is not the absence of structure, but an orientation toward shared authority, reflexive editing practices, and a willingness to hold uncertainty and partial knowing as epistemically meaningful (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2020; Walker, 2021).

This project was shaped by a series of methodological refusals that clarified both the ethos and limits of our approach (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2022; Chang et al., 2012). We refused extractive interviewing, narrative sanitization, and the centering of a single authoritative voice, alongside pressures to prioritize coherence and polish over affective truth or to frame participants as data sources rather than epistemic partners (Fricker, 2007; Stahlke Wall, 2016). These refusals are not absences, but active ethical commitments that shaped how knowledge was generated and shared, enabling relational, dialogic, and neuroqueer forms of inquiry to emerge without erasure (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2020; Walker, 2021).

As part of our methodological reflexivity, we also acknowledge that while podcasting offers meaningful forms of access for many neurodivergent people, it is not a universally accessible medium. Its reliance on spoken language privileges verbal and auditory communication and may exclude non-speaking participants or those for whom sound-based engagement is inaccessible (Kulmala et al., 2024; Le, 2024). Although this project did not include non-speaking contributors, future neuroqueer podcasting methodologies could integrate alternative communicative modes, including text-based or AAC-mediated contributions, in line with broader commitments to accessibility, relational accountability, and epistemic inclusion (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2022).

Podcasting as Neuroqueer Method

Podcasting functioned as a neuroqueering medium by disrupting hierarchical research norms and privileging care, reciprocity, and emergent dialogue over control or closure. These commitments were operationalized in the podcast episode through a loosely scaffolded roundtable format and open-ended prompts that prioritized relational dialogue over extractive questioning. As a method, the podcast recording allowed for multiple forms of accessibility and participation that supported diverse cognitive, sensory, and social needs. Accessibility became an enacted ethic rather than an afterthought as an ongoing negotiation of needs and relationships that expanded what inclusion could look like in research, as demonstrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2.

Podcast end-to-end process.

Scaffolding Dialogue

Five guiding questions intentionally enacted the project's conceptual and methodological commitments. Rather than extracting data, they were designed to orient the conversation toward openness, reflexivity, and co-production, ensuring lived experience remained central. Although the dialogue was initially meant to unfold organically, one participant requested additional structure for accessibility. In response, a run sheet was created outlining approximate timings and the guiding questions, providing gentle grounding without restricting flow.

Facilitation followed a consistent rhythm: the first author introduced each question, invited dialogue, ensured all voices were heard, and offered brief syntheses before moving on. The discussion unfolded across six segments: opening, five guiding questions, and a closing reflection. Our conversation was scaffolded by five guiding questions:

The “Why” and “How” of Neuroqueer Podcasting: What does podcasting make possible for us that other forms of research, writing, or advocacy cannot?

Inaccessibility of Traditional Knowledge Spaces: Where have we felt excluded or limited by traditional knowledge spaces, and how does podcasting disrupt or transform those barriers for us and our listeners?

Lived Experience as Knowledge in Its Own Right: When has our lived experience been dismissed, and how might we reclaim and honor it as valid, layered, and generative knowledge?

Holding Complexity, Contradiction, and Messiness: What truths live in the contradictions, tangents, and half-finished thoughts that emerge when we talk like this?

Resonance, Recognition, and Community-Building: How does this kind of podcasting ripple into neurodivergent community and belonging?

During the recording, these scaffolds did not constrain spontaneity; instead, they created a steady baseline from which participants could diverge without losing orientation. For example, when initial uncertainty arose about turn-taking, the group collectively experimented with visual cues and gentle facilitation until a rhythm emerged that balanced structure with fluidity. The guiding questions acted less as interview prompts and more as developmental anchors, places participants could return to after moments of intensity, laughter, or emotional resonance. This scaffolding allowed the conversation to move dynamically between analytic reflection and deeply personal narrative, reflecting the nonlinear logic of neuroqueer communication.

Data Analysis: Co-Creating Knowledge Through Podcasting

The discussion was shaped by five guiding questions, but during analysis, meaning emerged not from individual prompts but through recurring resonances across the conversation. The episode is treated as a living neuroqueer collaboration in which knowledge arises relationally and affectively. This approach aligns with collaborative autoethnography (Chang et al., 2012), neuroqueer methodologies (Stevens & Kirby, 2025), and work on epistemic justice and repair (Fricker, 2007), disrupting neuronormative hierarchies by foregrounding voice, emotion, embodiment, and relation as legitimate epistemic sites.

Step 1: Establish Positionality and Context

The analysis began with a reflexive statement articulating the first author's relationship to the podcast episode, acknowledging their dual role as both participant and analyst. This involved situating one's interpretive stance, affective position, and contextual factors such as relational proximity. Table 1 also outlines the positionality of all the podcasters who contributed.

Table 1.

Positional and Identity Characteristics of Podcasters.

Neurodivergent Podcaster	Non-cisgender	Non-heterosexual	Cultural/Racial Identity	Professional Lens
Caitlin Hughes	✓	✓	Australian (White)	Social Work Research
Chris Wells	✓		American (White)	Social Work Research
Emma Nicholson		✓	Australian (White)	Business
Bee Mayhew		✓	American (White)	Community Development
Sheldon Gay			American (Black)	Speaker Advocate
Marni Kammersell			American (White)	Education Research
Teena Mogler			Australian (White)	Social Work Research

Reflexive Statement

My role in initiating the podcast was shaped by a commitment to neuroqueering research and informed by lived experience as a late-identified, multiply neurodivergent researcher: Having encountered academic spaces that demanded masking and restraint, I sought to create a research environment where difference could be expressed authentically and honored as knowledge. Similar to the collective autoethnographic re-storying described by Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al. (2023), our process centered on mutual recognition rather than external validation. We created knowledge with and for one another, using our shared lived experience as a basis for affirming our identities as neurodivergent podcasters. Affectively, I entered this project with both excitement and a quiet defiance: a wish to refuse the flattening of neurodivergent voices. I felt warmth, kinship, and mischief in the laughter and tangents that filled the conversation, alongside grief at the epistemic injustices that necessitate such spaces. Relationally, I am both participant and analyst, insider and curator. My interpretation is shaped by friendship, shared values, and embodied resonance with my co-participants. (Caitlin)

Collective Positionality Statement

Our podcaster collective includes academics, practitioners, community advocates, and podcasters at different career stages, many of whom are late-identified or multiply neurodivergent. We identify as neurodivergent across different configurations, while acknowledging the partial and situated nature of the experiences represented. We contribute from intersecting perspectives of queerness, gender diversity, cultural identity, and lived experience of navigating systemic barriers across academic and community contexts. While our collective is predominantly white and situated within Western settings, we recognize how this positionality shapes and limits our perspectives. Rooted in neuroaffirming, relational, and critically reflexive practice, we share a commitment to reimagining knowledge, community, and healing through lived experience. Our work spans continents and modalities, grounded in the belief that storytelling, epistemic justice, and radical self-acceptance are pathways to collective flourishing.

Podcaster Biographies

Caitlin Hughes (she/they) is a queer, nonbinary, multi-exceptional Australian social worker, researcher, educator, and advocate. Late-identified as Autistic, ADHD, Gifted, and PDA, Caitlin co-hosts the Divergent Dialogues podcast (Hughes & Mogler, 2024–present) and brings a lived experience-led perspective to their work. They are committed to fostering epistemic healing through relational ethics, narrative reclamation, and accessible, lived experience-driven knowledge creation.

Chris Wells (they/them) is a multi-exceptional, nonbinary, and neurodivergent writer, podcaster, and developmental theorist specializing in Dąbrowski's theory of positive disintegration. They co-host the Positive Disintegration (Wells & Nicholson, 2021–present), cosmic cheer squad (Wells & Mayhew, 2025–present), and PDA: Resistance and Resilience (Wells & Kammersell, 2025–present) podcasts, and are the founding president of the Dąbrowski Center and co-creator of the Positive Disintegration Network. Chris brings lived experience and a deep commitment to reframing neurodivergence through a developmental and relational lens.

Emma Nicholson (she/her) is a neurodivergent Australian Senior Business Analyst, creative and advocate, identifying as gifted, Dyscalculic, with all five overexcitabilities (psychomotor, sensual, intellectual, imaginational, and emotional), as well as bisexual and Heathen. She co-hosts the Positive Disintegration Podcast and serves as Vice President of the Dąbrowski Center. She is driven by an unkillable passion to demystify positive disintegration and share hard-won truths to help others feel seen and supported.

Bee Mayhew (she/her) is a multiply neurodivergent (late-identified AuDHD, former gifted kid) writer, narrative collaborator, and communication coordinator for PDN Media. She co-hosts cosmic cheer squad podcast and has a background as a hospitality specialist and business owner. Bee's work centers on collective narrative-building and neurodivergent storytelling through activist, community-rooted practice.

Sheldon Gay (he/him) is a Black Gifted speaker and podcast host of I Must Be BUG'N (Black Underrepresented/Unidentified Gifted and otherwise Neurodivergent; Gay, 2023–present). Sheldon is guided by the belief that learning to deeply and wholly Love oneSelf, cape and kryptonite, is the path to finding, creating, and maintaining Love everywhere we go.

Marni Kammersell (she/her) is an American late-identified neurodivergent (Autistic, ADHD, PDA, gifted) parent of neurodivergent children. She is an educator, researcher, writer, and consultant, and co-hosts the PDA: Resistance and Resilience podcast. Marni is dedicated to honoring neurodivergent experience through relational, self-directed, and nervous-system-informed knowledge practices.

Teena Mogler (she/her) is an Australian AuDHD social worker, researcher, educator, and advocate, as well as co-host of the Divergent Dialogues podcast. As a mother to neurodivergent children, Teena is passionate about amplifying neurodivergent voices and disrupting epistemic injustice through lived experience-led, neuroaffirming, and critically reflexive knowledge practices.

Step 2: Created Verbatim Transcript

The episode was transcribed by the second author as closely as possible to how it was spoken. Every pause, laugh, overlap, and change in tone was kept in. Words were written as they were said, including hesitations, tangents, and unfinished sentences, to hold the rhythm and energy of the conversation. The transcript wasn’t meant to be a cleaned-up version of speech but a living record, something that lets the relational flow, emotion, and sensory texture of the conversation stay present on the page.

Reflexive Statement

As I moved through the audio editing process, I noticed myself hesitating around a line where I said that people in my field sometimes feel threatened by my work. The hesitation was familiar, a learned instinct to soften the edges, to avoid stating openly that challenging an existing narrative can provoke resistance. For a moment, I considered removing it. But the truth of that experience is part of the landscape I move through as a researcher whose work reframes long-standing assumptions. Choosing to keep the sentence became a reflexive act: a decision to name the tension rather than retreat from it.

That choice was only possible because of the environment created in this project. Podcasting has drawn me into friendships with people who understand my commitments, who value the work I’m doing, and who meet it with excitement rather than defensiveness. Sitting in conversation with this group felt like stepping into a community where complexity, risk, and innovation are held collectively. Being supported while breaking new ground is not something I’ve often experienced in academic spaces. The resonance and trust within this group gave me permission to show up without shrinking—an experience that continues to shape how I understand my role in the field and the possibilities of neurodivergent knowledge-making. (Chris)

Step 3: Layered Listening and Reflexive Noting

The recording was revisited through multiple “listening passes,” each oriented toward a different analytic layer:

Emotional Layer: Tracing affective currents such as joy, tension, or resonance.

Relational Layer: Observing moments of attunement, interruption, co-regulation, or shared rhythm.

Conceptual Layer: Following the emergence of ideas, metaphors, and narrative shifts.

Meta Layer: Attending to how the conversation itself enacts neuroqueer values, through nonlinearity, humor, tangents, or associative leaps.

Step 4: Identify Resonances

Rather than employing a traditional coding schema, the analysis privileged resonances that were the affective or conceptual threads that reverberated across the dialogue. These took the form of recurring metaphors, tonal shifts, shared imagery, or embodied reactions.

Step 5: Collective Reflexivity and Dialogical Meaning-Making

Analysis proceeded through dialogical engagement with the recorded voices, the transcript, and the co-participants themselves. Meaning was understood as co-constituted by emerging between voices rather than residing within an individual researcher. This step emphasized collaborative authorship and relational accountability, recognizing participants as epistemic partners in the analytic process.

Step 6: Reflexive Interpretation

For each identified resonance, interpretive commentary was developed to explore what it reveals about neurodivergent ways of knowing, relating, and world-making. Reflexive interpretation attended to how these moments challenged normative assumptions about communication, coherence, and credibility, while also documenting the embodied engagement in the act of analysis.

Podcast Recording Resonances

This section outlines the podcast resonances identified in the podcast recording (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Podcast resonances.

Voice as Epistemic Repair

And so the opportunity to, to, you know, claim a space that represents something that is, you know, divergent, something that is not normalized, something that is, you know, just, again, not, not, not, uh, readily accessible, but it's still a hundred percent valid—that, that's what, what podcasting for me is, is like it provides a unique opportunity. (Sheldon)

…in research, um, it can feel quite cold and, and distant…I think like podcasting, it really brings the people into the, into the room, so to speak…But I guess for myself, like, um, like I'm like a highly like sensory kind of person, so just being able to hear someone's voice, like it just adds something extra for me. (Caitlin)

…what's amazing about podcasting is that it allows for like unfiltered relational creation of knowledge. Like that's what we do, and we're thinking out loud together. We're discovering meaning together, we're allowing emotion and embodiment to be part of the record and the process. (Chris)

Throughout the podcast, voice recurs as both a metaphor and an act of reclaiming sound, tone, and presence from systems that silenced or filtered neurodivergent expression. Podcasting becomes a reparative medium: it returns cadence, accent, laughter, and hesitation to knowledge-making. Each voice re-centers lived experience as expertise and heals the epistemic wound of being misheard or unheard. Podcasting functions here as an act of epistemic repair through the re-voicing of those who were previously edited out of knowledge production (Fricker, 2007).

Within this collective, voice is not merely spoken sound; it is the texture of identity reclaiming its place in research. The laughter, pauses, accents, and tonal shifts resist academic sanitization. They transform vulnerability into validity. Speaking aloud becomes an embodied form of theory-making, where emotion and cadence are evidence. For those long silenced by disciplinary tone or professional masking, this voicing is both protest and healing as a re-authoring of what counts as credible. The sound of our voices, imperfect, layered, and alive, enacted a small but significant form of epistemic justice.

Relational Belonging Through Sound

…podcasting allows for a sense of belonging that is uniquely intimate in some ways compared to other media. (Chris)

…that idea of being in the room with people, having a conversation that you wouldn't otherwise be in a room with—and that people can dip into that conversation, but it doesn't feel threatening… (Marni)

Belonging in this conversation was not constructed through shared identity alone, but through relational rhythm, as pacing, silence, and the affective textures that travel between voices. Listening became a relational act: not the extraction of information but an exchange of presence. Bee's description of “a friend in my ear” captured this intimacy, suggesting that connection depends less on proximity than on resonance as the felt vibration of being heard and accompanied.

For neurodivergent podcasters and listeners often excluded from neuronormative social scripts, voice functions as a medium of co-regulation. Laughter and pauses act as shared breath; rhythm becomes a nervous-system language of safety. These are not incidental features of podcasting but technologies of care. Sound carries affect, and affect carries belonging. Unlike disembodied textual scholarship, the auditory form restores tone, timbre, emphasis, and breath, which are the sensory dimensions that let people remain embodied in their telling.

Messiness as Method

…you can bounce around and you can go on tangents and you can come back. And that non-linearity, the complexity of that is something that I really enjoy. (Marni)

…going down unexplored tangents and things that…opens us up to conversations we never thought we'd get into…the difference with podcasting is you can change your perspective halfway through…You, you get that real-time of, well, actually, I disagree with that…I think tangents and disagreement are a great way to open our own mind… (Emma)

…it's raw and it's there and it's for everybody to see…I think it's a really important process to expose because it, it creates a safety for people that might be excluded because it feels like you have to know what you think before you're allowed to speak, when the truth is you really don't…you can wing it and, um, just collect those ideas along the way. (Teena)

…it just has felt like such a paradox, like learning about neurodivergence, especially because it seems like coherence comes through contradiction. Like that the messiness is the path, or the method, that it reveals the depth. (Chris)

What emerged in this conversation was a collective permission to be unfinished. Messiness, in thought, humor, contradiction, and the drift of tangents, became both process and principle, challenging linear, outcome-driven models of academic production. Instead, the group moved through a kind of epistemic improvisation where meaning unfolded sideways, through association and interruption. These tangents, overlaps, and bursts of laughter did not distract; they revealed neuroqueer knowing in practice.

Allowing half-formed thoughts and shifting perspectives created space for emergence: the understanding that not knowing is fertile. In talking through, doubling back, and laughing mid-sentence, we were theorizing our own epistemology. Messiness was not a lack of rigor but its evidence as a living archive of thought forming, fracturing, and reforming between us, where presence mattered more than polish.

Accessibility and Ease

…it's, um, energetically easy to digest and consume for people. Um, and the mode of it means you don't have to carve out a certain space of time in your life to be able to access the information. (Emma)

…it brings another level of the human experience into whatever it is that I'm engaging with. Um, and for those of us who, um, have been told that their voice is not one that needs to be heard, it's also kind of a, a resistance to that as well. And so, yeah, I think that podcasting is a, a unique way to make things even more accessible… (Sheldon)

…podcasts bring this really immense accessibility to both like my life, and then when I get to tell people about what life looks like from what I've just listened to, I'm sharing that information further and it becomes a deeper story for me. (Bee)

And in terms of advocacy…I think it's like podcasting is, um, you know, I, I think maybe not as effortful as, as some other avenues. Um, and also has a bit of a more, a broad appeal or, or applicability so you can kind of get your message out, um, like a lot quicker, easier, maybe not costing as many spoons… (Caitlin)

Accessibility ran through the conversation as both a practical and affective principle as a refusal of exclusivity, exhaustion, and the assumption that scholarship must be effortful to be valuable. Podcasting emerged not as mere convenience but as a redistribution of energy: a way to make knowledge creation sustainable for bodies and minds navigating fluctuating capacity. For neurodivergent podcasters, accessibility was not “added on” but intrinsic to the medium. Its portability, low sensory load, and asynchronous intimacy made knowledge genuinely enterable, from bed, from work, on a walk, or in moments of overstimulation or rest. Podcasting's everyday, embodied form extends participation beyond institutional gatekeeping, honoring technological, cognitive, emotional, and cultural forms of access.

Lived Experience as Expertise

…you wouldn't go to a mechanic who's never driven a car…you would not go to someone who doesn't have the lived experience no matter how much qualification that they had. But for some reason, uh, when it comes to these types of topics, we're quite happy to have people talk at us about who we are without ever having lived that themselves. (Emma)

…before these educational institutions existed—I mean, what was valid then, right? I mean, the elders, our ancestors had wisdom that deserved to be heard, whether or not there was a, you know, a piece of paper that, you know, had some emblem on it that, that told them that they were, were worthy of whatever certification, right? (Sheldon)

…but the truth of it isn't because of some external validation. It's in the lived experience and listening to them about what it actually means to be existing in those bodies and in those minds… (Sheldon)

…there's some magic in this lived experience stuff…I really wanna prevent other people from going through what I did. And maybe if I share my story and my lived experience, some folks may resonate…particularly for neurodivergent people…podcasting or other means, um, really helps them to be able to understand themselves a lot more. (Caitlin)

…having that level of access to people who are open enough to recognize the value of my

lived experience and how I translate it and then how I put it back in the world to reach other people is deeply meaningful. (Bee)

…they were constantly invalidating my lived experience…it's been really hard for me as somebody who now has to challenge the existing or the mainstream narrative…you don't get to define who I am and what my journey is. This was my path here and it's your ableism and your sanism that has to be grappled with here, not my background and lived experience. (Chris)

Throughout the conversation, lived experience was not treated as a supplement or anecdote but as epistemic ground. Participants spoke from their realities rather than about them, collapsing the hierarchy between academic authority and embodied knowing. This stance enacted what Le (2024) calls epistemic agency: the right to define one's own knowledge terms and conditions. Emma conveyed how exclusion became a catalyst for creation. Sheldon framed expertise as ancestral continuity, invoking oral traditions as legitimate genealogies of knowing. Chris's account of being told to leave out their lived experience exposed how institutions pathologize precisely what gives research its depth: the affective and moral labor of having lived it.

Through humor, memory, and emotional truth, the podcast produces a counter-archive that revalues forms of lived experience routinely marginalized by academic norms. We use the term counter-archive deliberately, drawing on decolonial and abolitionist traditions that understand archiving as a site of power rather than neutral preservation (Bhakuni, 2023; White, 2023). Unlike some forms of community archiving that remain oriented toward institutional legibility or inclusion, counter-archives enact a refusal of epistemic extraction, coherence, and sanitization (Chapman, 2023; Fricker, 2007). They privilege relationality, partiality, and situated voice, attending not only to what is said but to how, by whom, and under what conditions. In this sense, the podcast functions as a living counter-archive: not a static repository of testimony, but an ongoing practice of epistemic disruption and repair (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2022; Khan & Naguib, 2017).

Podcasting further destabilizes traditional hierarchies, replacing citation with conversation and allowing knowledge to emerge relationally, highlighting that the lived and the intellectual are inseparable as each animates and deepens the other. Within this relational knowledge-making, rigor is redefined not as distance or neutrality but as emotional accuracy, ethical commitment, and fidelity to lived truth.

Multiplicity and Difference as Community

…we're not looking for communities where everybody has to be the same, where people are afraid to be their authentic selves…even if we share the same neurotype, that same label, that our experiences have to, again, a hundred percent align for us to find a way to, uh, feel like we belong together… (Sheldon)

…our voices all represent some level of flowing from a similar basin of attraction, from some similar sense of integrated values and care about discernment, care about doing the work really well. Regardless of our professional training, our academic training, our ability to translate, we all are here helping each other, amplifying each other, and bridging our

voices to help the maximum amount of people possible… (Bee)

…we are scattergraph unicorns, right?…when you're an outlier, the chances are that you can be more different to someone else who is an outlier on the opposite side of the graph than you are to the typical, right?…The hallmark is what makes us radically different and sometimes makes us radically different to each other…you can have people who are wildly different

and yet creating community out of that difference….But that's actually what makes us

part of this community—being a bunch of, of outliers… (Emma)

If the lived experience resonance discussed above reclaimed who can know, this resonance reclaimed how we belong. Across voices, podcasters insisted that community is not built on sameness but on the generative tension of difference. Divergence became the organizing principle of care. The group transformed what might once have felt like isolation into a constellation of distinct points held together by mutual recognition. In academic contexts, difference is often treated as data to be categorized or managed; here, it became a relational resource. Harmony emerges not through erasing discord but through learning to listen differently by hearing beauty in friction, meaning in divergence, and connection through difference.

Reciprocity and Ripple

…I sent your podcast to my eldest kid and their boyfriend at the time, who was a Black man and did not know that he was neurodivergent…And that led—that was like a direct connection to him getting professional counseling and scaffolding for him. (Bee)

…It's really about telling stories that help people see themselves, um, to hold up that mirror…that allows people to see, again, themselves outside of themselves in a way that, um, is easier for them to then reach out and, and, and be present with themselves. (Sheldon)

And we're modeling in our conversations to the people who are listening to us: You are not too much, you are part of this conversation. And I think that resonance builds community so much faster than writing. (Chris)

If belonging was the heartbeat of the conversation, reciprocity was its pulse. Stories and reflections were offered not as personal catharsis but as gestures outward, as invitations for recognition and connection. Participants spoke of listeners who wrote in, families who sought therapy, and communities who felt newly seen. Knowledge moved in circular motion: from speaker to listener, listener to community, and back again as validation and care. This flow embodies what Fricker (2007) describes as epistemic justice in practice: relational repair enacted through response. Bee's account of the podcast catalyzing real-world support illustrates how affect becomes action and resonance becomes reform. Podcasting, in this sense, operates not just as scholarship but as social infrastructure, as a bridge between isolated experiences and collective insight.

Reciprocity here extends beyond citation or feedback; it is an ethic of relational accountability, with each conversation generating new circles of understanding, each listener a potential collaborator in ongoing epistemic repair. Knowledge circulates through affective exchange rather than linear dissemination, challenging academic measurements of impact. What matters is not citation count, but the lives touched, the recognition sparked, the courage mirrored. This resonance affirmed the social reach of neuroqueer methods. Academic writing often ends at publication; podcasting continues to live, breathe, and move. The ripple is the proof that knowledge grounded in relation refuses to stay still.

Courage, Authenticity, and Defiance

…it takes a lot of courage and it, you ask someone who is a bit different or wants to do things a little bit differently, like you have to like go to war for it to, to really back yourself up and justify it…There is so much, you know, as Sheldon was saying, like racism, you know,

there's sexism, transphobia in academia. So whenever it doesn't fit within that, it's, it's really hard. Yeah. So then if you, you know, have multiple marginalized identities, it, it, that's—it feels like everything is stacked up against you. So yeah, I think podcasting, again,

like I just, I feel like there's some freedom there. (Caitlin)

…as you said, Chris, like it does take courage to be able to show up, um, as yourself when you are standing in the face of, you know, everything that is just completely opposite or completely different to how you are told that you're

meant to show up. (Caitlin)

Running through the conversation was a quiet, steady defiance, demonstrating a collective insistence that authenticity is both vulnerability and power. Participants spoke openly of exhaustion, fear, and the toll of self-exposure in systems that reward masking. Yet instead of retreating, they reclaimed visibility as practice: courage not as performance but as persistence. Emma's “I just did it myself” epitomized this stance as exclusion became creative impetus rather than defeat. Chris named the cost of bringing lived experience into academic spaces, while Bee framed courage as simply “showing up anyway,” refusing to edit herself into palatability.

The courage voiced here is reparative, as a refusal of erasure. Authenticity functioned as epistemic autonomy, unsettling the myth of professional neutrality and replacing it with radical honesty as rigor. The act of recording, of being publicly human, carries its own defiance when professionalism rewards distance. In this shared unmasking, authenticity became a method. It modelled what neuroqueer scholarship might be: rigorous because it is real.

Humor and Play as Co-Regulation

Laughter rippled through the recording like a collective exhale. The infamous “platypus,” a metaphor introduced by participant Sheldon, became more than an inside joke; it was a neuroqueer emblem of joyful neurodivergent absurdity and the body's way of metabolizing intensity. Humor here was not diversion but regulation: an embodied language of safety that allowed emotion, intellect, and difference to coexist. Jokes and side-quests were not digressions but strategies of co-regulation that kept energy circulating and connection intact. Play dissolved hierarchy. It lets seriousness and silliness sit side by side, collapsing the false divide between academic and affective labor. Humor functioned as both shield and bridge by interrupting shame, softening formality, and sustaining attention.

The Chat Box as Relational Data and Neuroqueer Method

Alongside the recorded conversation, the chat box acted as a parallel site of data and relational practice as an affective undercurrent capturing what words could not. Participants exchanged humor, affirmations, and care, sustaining co-regulation throughout. Moments such as, “It shifts the conversation from…What's wrong with me?…to…Oh! I’m like that too, I see myself’ (Bee), illustrates how resonance transformed self-doubt into shared recognition. Emojis, hearts, sparkles, and laughter became embodied gestures of validation, demonstrating epistemic compassion (Ling, 2018). When emotion surfaced, the group met it with warmth, treating feeling as data rather than a distraction, an act of epistemic repair (Bhakuni, 2023).

As with the wider conversation, the chat became a site of humor and play that softened intensity and deepened connection, enacting a gentle refusal of neuronormative polish and efficiency. As one noted, “All thoughts being half-finished… feels like an opportunity to remain curious” (Sheldon). Collectively, the chat log forms a living archive of neurodivergent relational ethics: a space where resonance outweighed representation and affective honesty replaced academic polish, enacting epistemic justice moment by moment through emoji, humor, and care.

Discussion

Across these resonances, podcasting revealed itself not simply as a medium but as a neuroqueer way of knowing and a methodological shift that challenges what counts as legitimate scholarship (Barnett, 2024; Walker, 2021; Walker & Raymaker, 2021). Rather than treating voice, affect, and relation as peripheral, the podcast episode positioned them as central epistemic forces. Within critical neurodiversity studies, this matters: the field requires methods that hold multiplicity, emotional truth, and embodied difference (Stevens & Kirby, 2025).

The podcast was recorded with an orientation toward neurodivergent listeners, including community members, practitioners, and researchers navigating similar forms of epistemic marginalization. Audience was not incidental to the method but constitutive of it, shaping both the tone and epistemic register of the conversation. This orientation toward listeners understood to share material and affective stakes shaped how we spoke and listened, shifting the register away from explanation toward mutual recognition and collective sense-making, and foregrounding relational knowledge and lived experience as epistemically meaningful (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2022; Fricker, 2007; Ling, 2018). This audience positioning is central to the project's commitments to epistemic justice and the redistribution of interpretive authority (Bhakuni, 2023; Walker, 2021).

Where traditional research leans on distance and abstraction, the podcast demonstrated how knowledge can emerge through relational attunement, responsiveness, co-presence, and the live unfolding of thought (Chang et al., 2012; Kurtz, 2014). This approach disrupted conventions of control and neutrality by foregrounding emergence as both process and analytic stance. Our conversation demonstrated this attunement in practice. When Sheldon paused, saying, “I don’t even have the words yet,” the silence that followed was a shared analytic moment: the group collectively recognized affect as data rather than a communicative lapse. Similarly, Marni's description of podcasting as “a gentler way [for listeners] to be in the room with people with wildly different perspectives” captured how tone, cadence, and presence transmit meaning beyond language. These moments illustrate a neuroqueer epistemology in action, one where hesitation, affective charge, and relational resonance are treated as legitimate forms of knowledge, expanding what counts as evidence within critical neurodiversity studies.

This project also reframed rigor. Instead of coherence or replicability, rigor emerged as an ethic of attentiveness by listening closely to nuance, contradiction, and emotional texture. By tracing resonances rather than reducing them to categories, the analysis preserved the relational integrity of experience, aligning with calls for methods that take lived complexity seriously (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2023).

Podcasting further illuminated forms of sensory and affective circulation that written scholarship rarely captures. Knowledge travelled through tone, vibration, and embodied recognition, revealing forms of impact that lie outside citation metrics: listeners finding language for themselves, families seeking support, communities recognizing their own stories reflected. These ripple effects reflected knowledge not as an abstraction but as a lived transformation.

In our conversation, these relational ethics took concrete shape in the ways participants responded to difference and intensity. When Emma described neurodivergent people as “scattergraph unicorns,” outliers who may be more different from one another than from the statistical norm, the group recognized this tension not as a barrier but as a generative condition for collective meaning-making. Difference became the epistemic engine rather than a disruption to coherence. This aligns with neuroqueer commitments to multiplicity: knowledge is not derived from consensus but from the friction and resonance that arise when divergent minds meet in shared inquiry (Barnett, 2024; Kulmala et al., 2024; Walker, 2021).

Across our recorded conversation, the generative qualities of podcasting were immediately tangible. Moments of spontaneous resonance, emotional intensity, and relational attunement shaped the dialogue in ways that written methods rarely capture. For instance, when Bee offered an unexpected reflection that left the group briefly silent, the pause itself became a form of meaning-making, as an embodied acknowledgment of connection and recognition. Such moments illustrate the developmental and relational dynamics that podcasting activates: the way live dialogue surfaces difference, tension, and insight in real time, allowing participants to think with one another rather than merely about one another (Chang et al., 2012; Pruder St. Antoine, 2021). This atmosphere of emergence is central to what podcasting makes possible as a neuroqueer, lived-experience-led methodology.

Together, these dynamics show podcasting as critical neurodiversity studies in action: a field where scholarship listens as much as it speaks, where presence becomes epistemically meaningful, and where repair is enacted through resonance rather than theoretical declaration. This method materializes a future in which sound becomes a site of solidarity, and where knowledge is valued for its capacity to connect, affirm, and transform (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2020; Chapman, 2023).

Challenges, Tensions, and Methodological Friction

Podcasting created a richly generative space for neuroqueer collaborative autoethnography, yet it also surfaced practical and relational demands. Coordinating across time zones, fluctuating capacities, and competing commitments highlighted the relational labor of collaboration and required flexibility as both an ethical stance and a methodological principle. The embodied dynamics of conversation added further friction: early uncertainty about turn-taking created awkwardness until a “hands up” system was introduced, which was equitable, but at times disruptive to spontaneous flow.

As a collaborative autoethnography, the findings reflect the situated experiences of seven podcasters and do not represent the full heterogeneity of neurodivergent life. Including participants with higher support needs, non-speaking communicators, and more diverse cultural contexts would deepen the methodological reach and broaden the epistemic landscape of future work.

Neuroqueering the process, resisting linearity, polish, and neuronormative academic expectations, often conflicted with institutional demands for clarity. Yet tangents, pauses, contradictions, and affective intensity proved epistemically productive, showing that messiness is a methodological resource rather than noise. These tensions also shaped the emotional and analytic texture of the work: neurodivergent dialogue moved through layered immediacy, with humor revealing insight, overwhelm signaling conceptual limits, and associative leaps surfacing deeper patterns. Capturing this without flattening it presented a challenge to transcription and analysis, but it reflected the core dynamics of neurodivergent cognition.

Questions about alignment with conventional methods became invitations to adapt academic norms within a neuroqueer framework. Reflexivity emerged as distributed and multimodal, through conversation, voice notes, embedded comments, and collective negotiation, rather than linear written reflection. These fragments functioned as both method and data, showing how knowledge was co-created through difference, translation, and relational attunement. Feedback from non-academic collaborators was crucial in maintaining accessibility and grounding theoretical framing in lived relationality.

Ethical practice remained central throughout the project. Sharing lived experience involved vulnerability, emotional labor, and professional risk, requiring relational accountability, reciprocity, and strong community control over narrative and interpretation. Holding space for both vulnerability and analytic force demanded methods that honor complexity rather than tidy it away. Rigor was maintained through epistemic co-regulation, as an ethic of mutual accountability that balanced accessibility, flexibility, and methodological integrity. These negotiations demonstrate how neuroqueer collaborative research continually reimagines what counts as legitimate knowledge, grounding rigor in relational, process-based, community-held ways of knowing rather than in neuronormative academic neatness.

Lessons in Critical Neurodiversity Methodology

Podcasting challenges the structural and linguistic inaccessibility of traditional academic formats. While peer-reviewed publications are often paywalled, rigid, and written in exclusionary language, podcasting allows knowledge to circulate through voice, tone, and dialogue (Mellifont, 2019). This accessibility is central to resisting epistemic injustice, affirming neurodivergent communities’ right to access and shape knowledge on their own terms (Kulmala et al., 2024).

Podcasting enacts relational ethics and co-production. Our collective process foregrounded collaboration across diverse forms of neurodivergence, queerness, gender, and culture, positioning lived experience as generative knowledge (Kulmala et al., 2024). The method itself became an ethical commitment to accountability, embodied knowing, and creating space for resonance rather than reduction (Le, 2024).

Podcasting honors messiness, contradiction, and affect. Where conventional research often demands coherence and closure, our dialogue embraced tangents, half-formed ideas, and emotional intensity as valid and generative (Walker & Raymaker, 2021). These qualities mirror the complexity of neurodivergent life and resist the pressures to sanitize experience. Podcasting thus operates as a radical, relational method of knowledge-making within critical neurodiversity studies. It disrupts the flattening tendencies of institutional production and centers co-created, community-rooted epistemologies (Kulmala et al., 2024; Mellifont, 2019).

Conclusion

This article positions podcasting as an emerging research method within critical neurodiversity studies. We show how podcasting, when used as a form of neuroqueer collaborative autoethnography, functions both as a conceptual framework and a practical approach to inquiry. Conceptually, it extends neuroqueer methodologies by centering relationships, uncertainty, and lived experience as valid forms of knowledge. Practically, it offers a model for participatory and accessible knowledge-making that challenges the structural barriers of traditional academic practice.

Podcasting can turn everyday conversation into rigorous cultural analysis. Following Stahlke Wall's (2016) call for balance, our work demonstrates thats podcasting can be both evocative and analytic. Building on collaborative autoethnography (Chang et al., 2012), Le's (2024) intersectional commitments, and the storytelling practices of Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al. (2023), we argue that podcasting is more than a means of dissemination. It is a dialogic and community-building methodology that supports epistemic justice. In this way, podcasting becomes a practice of epistemic repair: a space where neurodivergent truths are spoken, heard, and sustained across time (Bhakuni, 2023). Podcasting disrupts neuronormative gatekeeping, honors multiplicity, and creates living archives of shared meaning that nurture neurodivergent knowledge ecologies.

As critical neurodiversity studies continue to evolve, there is an urgent need for multimodal, participatory, and neurodivergent-led methods that connect the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Podcasting exemplifies this cross-disciplinary potential, inviting more relational and resonant forms of knowledge production. We therefore call for the wider adoption of podcasting and other creative, community-rooted practices, not as supplementary modes of communication, but as central methodologies for building more accessible, just, and flourishing futures in neurodiversity research.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-ndy-10.1177_27546330261437265 - Supplemental material for Voices at the Margins: Podcasting as Neuroqueer Collaborative Autoethnography and Epistemic Healing

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-ndy-10.1177_27546330261437265 for Voices at the Margins: Podcasting as Neuroqueer Collaborative Autoethnography and Epistemic Healing by Caitlin Hughes, Chris Wells, Emma Nicholson, Bee Mayhew, Sheldon Gay, Marni Kammersell and Teena Mogler in Neurodiversity

Supplemental Material

sj-mp3-2-ndy-10.1177_27546330261437265 - Supplemental material for Voices at the Margins: Podcasting as Neuroqueer Collaborative Autoethnography and Epistemic Healing

Supplemental material, sj-mp3-2-ndy-10.1177_27546330261437265 for Voices at the Margins: Podcasting as Neuroqueer Collaborative Autoethnography and Epistemic Healing by Caitlin Hughes, Chris Wells, Emma Nicholson, Bee Mayhew, Sheldon Gay, Marni Kammersell and Teena Mogler in Neurodiversity