Divergent Landscapes

Authenticity, Connection, and Wilderness in Transformative Praxis

In order to access what little help was available, I had to weigh potential benefits against acceptance of highly pathologized diagnostic criteria (Bottema-Beutel, 2020; Raymaker et al., 2020; Pearson & Rose, 2021; Chapman, 2023).

The present state of autism related discourse, theory, and praxis in the academic and professional spheres is deplorable. The discourse and theory reflect a level of ignorance and bigotry that would be regarded as scandalous in most academic circles today if it involved any other historically oppressed group.
(Walker, 2021, pp. 144-156)

We'll continue with an exploration of Authenticity, Connection, Wilderness, and Transformation before addressing Divergent Landscapes as a theoretical foundation for exploring possibilities within post-normal futures, redefining the ways we interact with ableism, difference, and disability.

Divergent Landscapes: Authenticity

(Michelle, 2022)

If one cannot leverage control over capital, and finds themself unable to sustain the effort required in direct service to capital, they become part of a surplus class, neither supported nor fully excluded (Marx, 1990; Federici, 2004; Adler-Bolton & Vierkant, 2022).

[Humans] make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted by the past.
(Marx & Padover, 1972)

racism and colonialism were primary to emergence of capitalism as a global system
feminists describe continuous extraction of unpaid emotional and reproductive work
disability and related discrimination is both created, and made worse, by capitalism
hording capital via environmental destruction will ruin our planet, ending human life

(Robinson, 2000; Hochschild, 2012; Oliver, 1990; Kovel, 2002)

Divergent Landscapes: Connection

The innate human tendency for biophilia (the effortless adoration of and enduring connection to natural objects, beings, elements, and processes) demands a sea-change from a too-common perspective of natural separation, categorization, and domination. Our human-nature connections form the basis of sustainable and scalable ecologies of practice (Flaherty, Heider, & Larson, 2023).

Range men according to their natural abilities, putting them into classes separated by equal degrees of merit.
(Galton, 2018)

An ever-widening stream of inferior stock is mixing itself with our offspring, contributing to the deterioration of the race.
(Kraepelin, 1922)

(Crowe, n.d.)

Divergent Landscapes: Wilderness

When one's very identity is commonly held as an object of disgust, there is remarkably little choice left when seeking to show up authentically in community with a presence beyond the counter-social behavior of demanding change (Yergeau, 2018). What choice may remain is built upon assimilation, not options for freedom of expression, much less the agency in choice beyond easily marketable false binaries.

The majority of people in the United States, according to a number of studies, identify with above-average intelligence (Heck, Simons, & Chabri, 2018).

An increasingly uninhabitable and constricting definition of normality has left individuals or private companies to determine whether neurodivergent life should be allowed to reproduce in a world that has utterly failed to accommodate neurodivergence (McGuire, 2013).

Divergent Landscapes: Transformation

Transformation begins, not with action, but with imagination; we humans tend to build what we see. So, unless we take enough time to contemplate various possible futures we will almost certainly continue to reify the same damaging theories that previously led to disability in praxis.

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select -- doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and the race of his ancestors.
(Watson, 1924)

Centering disabled people as primary experts regarding their own experience sets up a bold challenge to the prior assumptions of authority in psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy, among many other clinical professions (Chapman, 2023, p. 140).

Neurodivergence-Informed Therapy

re-conceptualization of dysfunction as relational rather than individual
(supplanting pathology with neurodivergent perspectives)
importance of neurodivergence acceptance, disability community, pride,
and culture to emancipation from neuro-normativity
need for a relational epistemic humility regarding different experiences
of neurodivergence and disablement

(Chapman & Botha, 2022)

The Socialist Patients Collective, active in 1970s West Germany, produced a manifesto entitled Turn Illness into a Weapon for Agitation in which they called for the use of illness as leverage in demanding resources for the fight against capitalist domination. Their stated aim was to break the associations between health, normality, and productivity (Chapman, 2023, p. 146).

Divergent Landscapes: Conclusion

always too much and never enough

abused by extractive abandonment

Honor calls to build, teach, and engage in collaborative healing practices, synergetic and self-directed care, working toward wellbeing in solidarity; commonly held inclusive practices celebrating diversity and flexibility through right relationship are deeply needed by modern humans (Adler-Bolton & Vierkant, 2022; Graby, 2015; UPIAS, 1975).

A transitional politics that centres the surplus and, crucially, finds ways to empower the surplus as surplus, will need to take different forms to traditional union organising, which is based on the threat of withholding regular waged labour. [...] It may be that demand for Universal Basic Income gives those members of surplus who have never worked more economic power -- primarily the power to withhold as consumers but also to organise towards direct action -- regardless of whether they can withhold labour.
(Chapman, 2023, p. 162)

Divergent Landscapes: Futures

Just as we may understand ourselves to be in relationship with everything we encounter, we may also model those relationships within.

One may want to consider building several different maps to meet with varying environmental demands on skills and resources, or the level of masking required via encounters with pathologization or bias (Pearson & Rose, 2021).

Noted as vital in healing and coping with marginalization, embrace of a marginalized identity was one key finding resounding through the recent work of many neurodivergent academics (Umagami, 2023, Walker, 2021, Yergeau, 2018).

The need for extended rest and low stimulation environments going unmet has been cited as frequent cause for overload (Williams, Corbin & Hart, 2023). These are people in need, not of correction or fixing; they find themselves desperate for reliable access to quiet, calm, acceptance, curiosity, and trust.

This is wilderness that lives among us, has always lived among us, and only recently became a problem.

The Empire of Normality, and in turn the pathology paradigm, emerged in the context of capitalist logics, but have now become pervasive and partially distinct systems of domination in their own rights. [...] at this historical moment, the collective building of a mass anti-capitalist politics of neurodiversity will be necessary for not just neurodivergent liberation but also for our broader efforts towards collective liberation.
(Chapman, 2023, pp. 164-165)

References

Larson, M. P. (2025). Divergent Landscapes: Exploring Authenticity, Compassion,

and Ecowellness through Neuroqueer Therapeutics, Lived Experience, and Self-Acceptance. [Unpublished manuscript]. Transpersonal Wilderness Therapy, Naropa University.