Academic Collaboration Through the Double Empathy Lens: A Guide to Inclusive Research Practices
I'm thrilled to be Presenting this Weekend at the Stanford Neurodiversity Summit 2025 and wanted to give you a sneak peak!
A couple of months ago, I learned that my poster proposal for “Academic Collaboration Through the Double Empathy Lens: A Guide to Inclusive Research Practices” was selected for this year’s **Stanford Neurodiversity Summit (SNS)** and I wanted to share it with you all here.
The theme for 2025 is Thriving Together: Building Inclusive Communities Across Neurotypes. It emphasizes practical strategies that don’t just “accommodate” neurodivergent people but recognize the strengths, creativity, and knowledge that emerge from truly collaborative spaces.
The Stanford Summit is in California (a long-ass flight after I just got back from a trip to Japan) and it was scheduled for the same weekend as the Autism-Europe International Congress which is in nearby Dublin and where all my Neurodiversity Journal colleagues are. I struggled to decide which to attend! But in the end, since I was invited to present at Stanford and because it is one of the leading international gatherings where neurodivergent people, families, clinicians, educators, researchers, and policymakers come together to imagine and build a more inclusive future; I decided to go there.
What is it they say? (Wo)man plans. God laughs? For reasons I won’t get into here, but not unrelated to the political unrest in the Divided States of America, my trip got canceled and I will be presenting virtually tomorrow. Instead of going to Ireland, I had the incredible opportunity to fill in for a speaker who dropped out of the Neurodiversity Network Conference in Stoke-on-Trent yesterday. I’ll do a separate post about that presentation and the incredible experience I had there but today I wanted to share more about my contribution at SNS.
If you listened to the Academia and Ableism episode of The Autistic Culture podcast, you might be surprised to learn that my poster is called:
**“Academic Collaboration Through the Double Empathy Lens: A Guide to Inclusive Research Practices.”**
It draws on my experiences working on my dissertation which included 2 neurodivergent people and 2 neurotypical people (including our academic advisor) doing research on Autistic people. I really did not know how I was going to survive that experience and I have to say in the end it was quite a gift. First of all, my fellow ND researcher was a sanity check. I would not have wanted to do this alone so cheers to everyone who has been the only one in a majority group. But I have to said both of the neurotypical members of the research team really blew me away with their desire to learn from our lived experience and make the research process itself accessible to my ND colleague and I in really generous ways.
From this perspective, the question for my poster became: **how did we build research practices that supported authentic collaboration across neurotypes?**
Findings: Three Inclusive Practices
I identified **three inclusive practices** that made our mixed-neurotype academic teams more inclusive. Now, I have to give our advisor Dr. Aimilia Kallitsounaki credit for a lot of this because she set the tone, but it really did feel like a collaborative journey.
1. Flexible Communication
Offer multiple communication modes (email, chat, shared docs, video, etc.)
Encourage both spoken and written participation
Share preferences early, minimize jargon, and provide agendas in advance
Summarize key points and check for shared understanding
2. Pacing with Care & Curiosity
Normalize different working styles and rhythms
Allow asynchronous decision-making
Build in time for reflection and iteration
Prioritize emotional regulation and flexibility over rigid deadlines
3. **Reflexive Collaboration**
Discuss neurotypes, sensory needs, and working preferences openly (like sharing pronouns)
Identify potential clashes without blame and explore compassionate compromises
Revisit agreements regularly and adjust processes collaboratively
Why It Matters
Now it might seem like this is about Academic groups, but I really think these lessons could work equally well in any cross-neurotype collaboration. The most important thing for me, was time. Being in a rush really makes working in neurodiverse teams a nightmare. We had so much time that there could be — and regularly were — days and even weeks where we could process if the decisions we made still worked for us and change our minds. That happened a LOT! I have never had a group project without an insane and unreasonable deadline that forced everyone into some level of misalignment.
The takeaway is simple but powerful: **inclusive practices don’t just help neurodivergent scholars—they strengthen teams overall.**
By embedding reflexivity, flexibility, and shared leadership, academic teams can produce richer, more equitable research outcomes. This is a shift from a model of “accommodating deficits” to one of co-creating strengths-based environments.
Gratitude
I’m deeply honored to have had the chance to work with an incredible research team at the University of Kent and then to have the chance to bring this work to the Stanford Neurodiversity Summit is a double blessing. It’s a space where ideas are not just exchanged but lived, where neurodivergent voices lead, and where community and scholarship meet.
References
Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, H., Chown, N., & Stenning, A. (Eds.). (2020). Neurodiversity studies: A new critical paradigm. Routledge.
Milton, D. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008
Pearson, A., Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, H., Kapp, S. K., Botha, M., McCauley, K., & Chown, N. (2023). Chapter 20: Learning the ways of each other: Reflections on working with a neurodiverse research team of strangers and friends. In H. Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, M. Botha, K. Hens, et al. (Eds.), Neurodivergent intersubjectivities: New possibilities of storying in research(pp. 229–238). Routledge.
Pellicano, E., Dinsmore, A., & Charman, T. (2014). Views on researcher–community engagement in autism research in the United Kingdom: A mixed-methods study. PLOS ONE, 9(10), e109946. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0109946
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.