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• Stimpunks is a community created by and for neurodivergent and disabled people.
• We offer support and assistance to each other.
• We provide grants to creators within our community.
• We offer opportunities for learning and growth.
• We conduct research that focuses on the needs and experiences of neurodivergent and disabled people.
• We pay fair wages to members of our community.
• We believe in the abilities and potential of all individuals.
• We believe in the right to make decisions for oneself.
• Being disabled in a society that favors able-bodied individuals is challenging.
• We provide real help to combat these challenges.
• We believe that providing direct support to individuals is the best way to help neurodivergent and disabled people overcome barriers and thrive.

AI Disclosure: The summary above was created with the help of Elephas AI Assistant.

Put simply, mutual aid is a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions by building relationships, networks of reciprocity, and communal autonomy from the state. Mutual aid may involve work to support people impacted by harmful systems and work to create alternative infrastructure. It can take the form of ride sharing, disaster response, food distribution, and much more, as you’ll soon see.

However, those engaging in mutual aid must ask themselves if their actions are providing material relief, avoiding legitimising oppressive systems, mobilising people for ongoing struggle, and accomodating marginalised groups. Mutual aid is not meant to be charity. It must actively cultivate liberatory skills, practices, and solidarity.

How We Can Change The World – YouTube

• Mutual aid is a form of political participation where people care for each other and work to change political conditions.
• It involves building relationships, networks of reciprocity, and autonomy from the state.
• Mutual aid can include things like ride sharing, disaster response, and food distribution.
• It is not charity, but rather an active cultivation of liberatory skills, practices, and solidarity.
• Mutual aid projects meet survival needs and build shared understanding.
• They mobilize people, expand solidarity, and build movements.
• Mutual aid projects are participatory and solve problems through collective action.
• Autistic communities are embracing ideas of mutual aid and collective care.
• Mutual aid groups aim to fill gaps in services left by the government.
• Disabled love and care is different from non-disabled interactions.
• Mutual aid is based on a sense of human solidarity and the recognition of the force borrowed from practicing mutual aid.
• Kropotkin’s ideas on mutual aid are relevant and being rediscovered by new generations of social movements.
• Mutual aid should be a foundational concept in social revolutionary projects.

Mutual aid is collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them. Those systems, in fact, have often created the crisis, or are making things worse.

We see examples of mutual aid in every single social movement, whether it’s people raising money for workers on strike, setting up a ridesharing system during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, putting drinking water in the desert for migrants crossing the border, training each other in emergency medicine because ambulance response time in poor neighborhoods is too slow, raising money to pay for abortions for those who can’t afford them, or coordinating letter-writing to prisoners. These are mutual aid projects. They directly meet people’s survival needs, and are based on a shared understanding that the conditions in which we are made to live are unjust.

Three Key Elements of Mutual Aid

1. Mutual aid projects work to meet survival needs and build shared understanding about why people do not have what they need.
2. Mutual aid projects mobilize people, expand solidarity, and build movements.
3. Mutual aid projects are participatory, solving problems through collective action rather than waiting for saviors.

Mutual Aid (Oct 27, 2020 edition) | Open Library

What is mutual aid?

“Solidarity, not charity.”

Why is a spoon share helpful?

• Interdependence, understanding and support
• Gives opportunity to help & care for other in on our own terms and within our own capacities
• Direct support in a community within a community
• It’s much easier to practice asking, offering, receiving, and declining among people who “get it”!

Collective Community Care: Dreaming of Futures in Autistic Mutual Aid

Increasingly, autistic communities have been exposed to ideas of disability justice, interdependence, access intimacy, collective/community care, and mutual aid. Care collectives, spoon shares, and other community care groups by and for disabled people, racialized people, LGBTQ2IA+ people (and people at this intersection) are growing in number. Is there a future for autistic spaces to also act as spaces of intentional mutual aid?

Moving from a rights-based perspective to a justice-based one necessitates a look at our care systems and re-envisioning how our communities function to ensure no one is left behind.

Collective Community Care: Dreaming of Futures in Autistic Mutual Aid, Autscape: 2020 Presentations

Non-disabled people in my life don’t know how to love me like disabled people do. I’m so thankful for all my disabled friends who know how to provide care, rest, support and love. Disabled love is critically different from my other interactions with the world. 1/4

I really wish non-disabled people could learn to love in the same caring modalities. Love looks like remembering my food intolerances. Love looks like saying “that sucks” when I complain. Love looks like calling to check in and telling me stories. 2/4

Love looks like someone bustling around at home doing everyday things that wanted to call just to be with me across time and space. Love looks like not trying to fix everything and just allowing bad days to be bad. Love looks accepting my need to isolate as much as possible. 3/4

Love looks like spaces for shared grief. Love looks like celebrating our mere existence and survival in a world so set on eradicating us. Love is everywhere in disabled communities. 4/4

Originally tweeted by Nicole Lee Schroeder, PhD (@Nicole_Lee_Sch) on April 15, 2022.

It is not love, and not even sympathy (understood in its proper sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to form a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love which induces wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces kittens or lambs to play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their days together in the autumn; and it is neither love nor personal sympathy which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as large as France to form into a score of separate herds, all marching towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river. It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy—an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life. . . . It is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience—be it only at the stage of an instinct—of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependence of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed.

Mutual aid, a factor of evolution (1903 edition) | Open Library

Is Kropotkin relevant again? Well, obviously, Kropotkin was always relevant, but this book is being released in the belief that there is a new, radicalized generation, many of whom have never been exposed to these ideas directly, but who show all signs of being able to make a more clear-minded assessment of the global situation than their parents and grandparents, if only because they know that if they don’t, the world in store for them will soon become an absolute hellscape.

It’s already beginning to happen. The political relevance of ideas first espoused in Mutual Aid is being rediscovered by the new generations of social movements across the planet. The ongoing social revolution in Democratic Federation of Northeast Syria (Rojava) has been profoundly influenced by Kropotkin’s writings about social ecology and cooperative federalism, in part via the works of Murray Bookchin, in part by going back to the source, in large part too by drawing on their own Kurdish traditions and revolutionary experience.

Introduction to Mutual Aid | The Anarchist Library

Stimpunks Learning Space offers community and space for passion-based, human-centered learning with purpose. Our learners collaborate on distributed, multi-age, cross-disciplinary teams with a neurodiverse array of creatives doing work that impacts community. Via equity, access, empathy, and inclusivity, we create anti-ableist space compatible with neurodiversity, the social model of disability, and all types of bodyminds. We create space for the neurodivergent and disabled people most ill-served by “empty pedagogy, behaviorism, and the rejection of equity“.

Stimpunks was forged in the quest for survival and educational inclusion. We had to roll our own education, because even the “all means all” of public education failed to include us. We’ve learned a lot along the way and present to you Stimpunks Space as the synthesis of our forced interdisciplinary learning. That learning connected us with neurodiversity communities, disability communities, educators, doctors, nurses, autism researchers, sociologists, tech workers, care workers, social workers, and a long list of others. We wove together the aspects of these disciplines that were compatible with our community of neurodivergent and disabled people into a human-centered pedagogy and philosophy. We left out the stuff incompatible with and harmful to us, such as all forms of behaviorism. We built a learning space that works for us using a zero-based design approach.

A human-centered education:

• Cultivates Purpose-Driven Classrooms
• Ends Dehumanizing Practices
• Demands Social Justice
• Builds a Human-Centered World

Build human-centered classrooms around four values:

• Learning is rooted in purpose-finding and community relevance.
• Social justice is the cornerstone to educational success.
• Dehumanizing practices do not belong in schools.
• Learners are respectful toward each others innate human worth.

What is the Human Restoration Project?

Cultivate purpose-driven classrooms by promoting experiential learning & community connection.

Research supports what teachers intuitively understand: that students ask fewer questions the longer they remain in school and engagement steadily declines over time.

“Promoting curiosity in children, especially those from environments of economic disadvantage, may be an important, underrecognized way to address the achievement gap. Promoting curiosity is a foundation for early learning that we should be emphasizing more when we look at academic achievement.”

At the same time, rates of depression and anxiety have steadily increased to become among the most diagnosed mental health disorders in children. Kids who feel isolated from school and their community frequently drop out turn to self-harm and self-medication through alcohol and drugs.

Purpose-finding, on the other hand, has been linked to prosocial outcomes and healthier lifestyles, and is inherently tied to positive identity and self-worth. By directly participating in building a better society and reflecting on the experience, students gain valuable insight into their identity in relation to the world around them.

A Human-Centered Education: Cultivates Purpose-Driven Classrooms – YouTube

End dehumanizing classroom practices by lessening & removing grades, homework, and behaviorism.

Assigning a grade instead of purely focusing on feedback leads to decreased motivation and understanding, lower academic achievement, and increased rates of cheating. We may not ever be able to get rid of grades entirely, but diminishing the salience of grades and grading is necessary if we desire to shift from a teacher-centered language of grading to a student-driven language of learning in the classroom.

Where behaviorism fails to foster agency it simultaneously creates a framework for excluding neurodivergent and disabled students while enabling the policing of students from non-dominant cultural, linguistic, and racial backgrounds.

A Human-Centered Education: Ends Dehumanizing Practices – YouTube

Demand social justice as a key toward educational equity and inclusive, critical pedagogy.

Inclusive classrooms are more than a legal obligation. Inclusion means instruction and assessment are created with a universal design in mind, one that draws from perspectives and ways of understanding beyond white, middle-class heteronormative and neurotypical perspectives and supports students in varied means of acting on and expressing their learning.

Nearly every nation on earth has been impacted by a history of colonization. In the United States in particular, we must also contend with the legacy of genocide, slavery, segregation, and inequity built into the foundation of our country. This history manifests today in part through the racialized outcomes of the prison-industrial complex and dehumanizing culture of policing imposed on all of our institutions, including school.

A Human-Centered Education: Demands Social Justice – YouTube

Build a human-centered world: focus on collaboration over competition & ensure a thriving public education system.

While schools exist as a microcosm of society, schools also exist in dialogue with society and as a multiplier of its generative and destructive traits. When societies adopt the language of the market that rewards competition over collaboration, conflict over solidarity, and short-term individual gain over long-term mutual sustainability, it should not surprise us when school policies and practices reflect the same.

Think of how we describe academic achievement in schools through the language of scarcity – achievement gaps, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, good schools vs failing schools, student loan debt, GPAs and class rank – the socioeconomic context of any of these metrics is inseparable from what they purport to measure and reward. And what they communicate is clear: that children who grow up in proximity to wealth reap the academic and socioeconomic benefits.

A Human-Centered Education: Builds a Human-Centered World – YouTube

It turns out that there is an emerging research framework—activist research—that is inclusive of multiple disciplines including educational research (Cushman, 1999; DeMeulenaere & Cann, 2013; Fine & Vanderslice, 1992; Knight, 2000; Malone, 2006; Nygreen, 2006), anthropology (Hale, 2006; Speed, 2006; Urla, & Helepololei, 2014) social movements and other social science research fields (Chatterton, Fuller, & Routledge, 2007; Choudry, 2014). A review of the theoretical frameworks, methodologies, findings, ethical issues, and challenges has allowed me to identify three characteristics that delineate activist researcher from other types of research: (1) combination of knowledge production and transformative action; (2) systematic multi-level collaboration; and (3) challenges to power.

The most salient characteristic of activist research is the belief that it must go farther than knowledge production; it must create transformative action. Knowledge production is the epitome of all research, even for studies that seek to expose inequities and call out oppressive systems and structures, but activist research goes further by committing to bringing about change with and for the participants (DeMulenaere & Cann, 2013; Hale, 2001, Fine & Vanderslice, 1992; Nygreen, 2006). Who is changed and how they are changed is a key aspect of activist research. DeMulenaere and Cann note that critical research is not necessarily activist research if it fails to include social transformative change, “at the spaces and sites of research…” (p. 557, 2013). They stress that if the only change that takes place is through reading of the published findings, then the study would not be considered activist research.

Hale contends that researchers who engage in cultural critique are committed to the research institution while activist researchers have dual commitments to the people and their political struggle and the academy (2006, p. 100). And it is this dual commitment that transforms the methodology beginning with the research topic and ending with the production of knowledge that is not only useful but transformative (Hale, 2001). Thus, activist research is an emerging research framework that shifts the focus from traditional knowledge production to commitment to working with others to produce transformative change. Traditional research methods such as ethnography, action research, and feminist research are situated within an activist research framework, leaving the means intact, but striving to change the ends.

From Theorizing in the Ivory Tower to Creating Change with the People: Activist Research as a Framework for Collaborative Action

Concerns have also been raised about the quality and rigour of autism research. For example, researchers have highlighted key omissions in the reporting of research, such as failures to declare conflicts of interest (Bottema-Beutel & Crowley, 2021) or the presence of adverse events (Bottema-Beutel et al., 2021). Concerns have also extended to the low standards underlying evidence-based practice (Bottema-Beutel, 2023) as well as replication failures (Gernsbacher & Yergeau, 2019). As Dawson and Fletcher-Watson (2021, p.1) note, the standards of research quality and ethics have not been applied to autism research to the extent that they should, which has “profoundly impacted how autistics are regarded and treated”. 

Two potential solutions have been proposed in relation to these aforementioned issues. The first solution regards greater involvement of the autistic and broader autism communities in research: in identifying research priorities, in deciding the design and conduct of research, in analysing and interpreting research findings, and in disseminating research more broadly (e.g., Pellicano et al., 2014). In essence, this solution involves shifting the traditional power balance in research from autism researchers to the autistic and broader autism communities. Participatory approaches such as these are thought to lead to better quality research that is more easily translated into practice (Balazs & Morello-Frosch, 2013; Forsythe et al., 2019). 

The second solution regards greater openness and transparency in the reporting of research (Hobson, Poole, Pearson & Fletcher-Watson, 2022). Open research is an umbrella term for several practices, underpinned by a desire for the products and processes of research to be accessible to those outside of the original research team (Munafo et al., 2017). Open scientific practices are closely aligned with efforts to improve research reproducibility, and reduce the risk of grey research practices, such as hypothesising after results are known (HARKing; Kerr, 1998), and over-analysing data (“p-hacking”; Simmons et al., 2011). 

In this paper, we discuss how combining participatory and open research practices may go some way toward addressing key issues inherent within autism research. First, we define both open research and participatory research. Then, we outline three key principles for autism researchers striving to make their work more open and participatory: (1) the need for adequate expertise and infrastructure to facilitate high quality research, (2) the need for a greater degree of accessibility at all stages of the research process, and (3) the need to foster trusting relationships between the autistic and research communities. Throughout this paper, we draw on examples from literature both within and outside the autism research field, and we conclude with reflections on how this may foster an autism research culture that better serves the autistic and broader autism communities. 

PsyArXiv Preprints | Towards Reproducible and Respectful Autism Research: Combining Open and Participatory Autism Research Practices